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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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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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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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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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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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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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