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Office dev (RSS)
In my last post , I looked briefly at MEF, and I’m wondering how this model can be applied to Office add-ins. The Office add-in model itself already achieves a level of dynamic composition, by virtue of the fact that the set of add-ins to be loaded is
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Having looked at Silverlight in Office client , I thought I’d round out the exercise by looking at Silverlight in Office server . It turns out that lots of people have looked at this before, and I relied heavily on information from several other people’s
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I had some ‘free’ time today waiting to give a demo at an MVP conference session – the session over-ran, and I found myself sitting in the hallway for an hour. So I got to thinking about Silverlight and Office. If we assume that Silverlight is more or
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I posted a while back about exposing an automation object from an add-in that fires events . That post was couched in terms of VSTO add-ins. A customer asked recently how the same technique could be used in a non-VSTO add-in. So, that’s the topic of this
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Just like my earlier post on message filters , this is an advanced scenario – so be warned: you almost certainly don’t want to do this . However, there are probably some extreme edge-case scenarios where this technique might be useful. For example, Office
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There are at least 9 different ways to start or connect to an Office app programmatically in managed code, as summarized in this table: PIA Interop Using the Office PIAs is the most RAD approach, with the greatest level of design-time and compile-time
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Can you use a managed usercontrol in an Office document in the same way that you can use a native ActiveX control – all without using VSTO? Some time ago, I posted about how to use native ActiveX controls within a doc-level VSTO solution, by wrapping
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Here at PDC, Misha Shneerson has just delivered a talk on a couple of very interesting new features provided by .NET 4.0. He did explain up front that these features have very broad applicability, but reading the session evals it's pretty obvious that
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Following on from my recent posts on exposing add-in objects, here and here , it occurred to me that its sometimes useful to be able to expose events from these objects. Recall that you can expose your add-in through the COMAddIn.Object property in the
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AddInSpy is a new diagnostic tool for reporting the maximum possible information about all Office add-ins registered on a machine. This is a free (unsupported) download, available on MSDN Code Gallery here . Covering article on MSDN here . In fact, there
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Continuing on from my earlier posts on building add-ins for multiple versions of Office , avoiding the PIA version conflict , and add-ins for multiple versions without PIAs , a reasonable way to design your solution would be to use the lowest-common-denominator
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We’ve released a slight update to the COM Shim Wizard. This is available as a free download here , and the covering article is on MSDN here . The differences Between v2.3.0.0 and v2.3.1.0 are summarized below. Setup The major difference between v2.3.0.0
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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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