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In my last post , I discussed how you could avoid any dependency on the Office PIAs by using ComImport to redefine the host application’s OM interfaces. Someone (A Developer) pointed out that I had actually omitted the trailing 2 members of the IRibbonControl
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In a previous post , I discussed how you could build an add-in for multiple versions of Office, and explained the problems in this approach (and why it is not officially supported). One of the reasons this is not supported is because you end up building
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In an earlier post , I looked at how you could morph a VSTO project for one application into a project for another application – specifically, how you could build a VSTO add-in for Access. Note that this is explicitly not supported. However, although
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In the past, before it became strategically acceptable to build Office-based solutions in managed code, it was common for people to build such solutions using pure COM technologies. They built native COM add-ins, using C/C++, or they built document-level
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I announced the release of v1 of the VSTO/VSTA Power Tools last time , and they've been getting quite a bit of use so far. The downloads are here - these include an overview document. Note that the documentation for the individual tools is installed in
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As I announced at the Office Developers Conference in San Jose this week, we’re releasing a set of power tools that complement the developer’s experience when building Office-based or VSTA-based solutions. These tools are freely downloadable here . We’re
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This of course is the advantage of using the old "shared add-in" project types – you can build one add-in that targets all versions of all Office apps that support COM add-ins (ie, 2000 onwards). The question is, can you do something similar with VSTO
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First, the Office client apps are COM-based. Normal COM activation relies on the registry. COM registration is a "last one wins" model. That is, you can have multiple versions of a COM server, object, interface or type library on a machine at the same
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Office 2007 introduced a set of new extensibility interfaces. Prior to Office 2007, there were several extensibility interfaces, which all behaved differently, required different development techniques, different deployment/registration and different
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I’m mostly interested in the runtime aspects of VSTO, and less interested in the RAD design-time aspects (however wonderful they are), and in this post I want to explore some of the low-level infrastructure that the VSTO runtime provides. As a developer
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Try this: create an add-in for Excel/Outlook/PowerPoint/Access with a custom task pane. Run the solution, see the custom task pane. Open another Excel workbook, see the custom task pane. Now, create an add-in for Word or InfoPath with a custom task pane.
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With VSTO 2005, you can build doc-level custom task panes (although we called them ActionsPanes). Our doc-level task panes were built on the old ISmartDocument technology – effectively, VSTO offered a streamlined RAD mechanism for building smart doc solutions.
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