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Office dev (RSS)
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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A number of people have reported that the link to the companion content seems to be broken. MSPress are aware of the problem, and are fixing it. Meanwhile, here's a direct link. http://download.microsoft.com/download/a/4/3/a433e8ad-25b5-420e-9126-292b380eb2f3/setup.exe
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I paused over my final mince pie today, and pondered the psychology of Office developers (as one does). Office development is a curious mix of different programming philosophies that has given rise to a number of interesting behavioral practices among
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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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Over the years, Office has exposed a number of different extensibility mechanisms, which all enable developers to build solutions based on Office. Each of these mechanisms is geared towards a different set of requirements, and the design of the extensibility
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