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Andrew Whitechapel

Visual Studio, Office and other Nonsense

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Exposing Events from Managed Add-in Objects
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 Read More...
AddInSpy - Diagnosing/Troubleshooting Office Add-ins
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 Read More...
Version-Specific UI in Add-ins
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 Read More...
Add-ins for Multiple Office Versions without PIAs (Pt2), or _VtblGap
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 Read More...
Add-ins for Multiple Office Versions without PIAs
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 Read More...
Ribbon and Task Pane in Access Add-ins
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 Read More...
Can you build one add-in for multiple versions of Office?
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 Read More...
Why is VS development not supported with multiple versions of Office?
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 Read More...
Office 2007 New Extensibility Interfaces
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 Read More...
Low-level support for ICustomTaskPaneConsumer, IRibbonExtensibility, FormRegionStartup, etc.
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 Read More...
The Anomalous Behavior of Custom Task Panes in Word and InfoPath
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. Read More...
Custom Task Panes: Doc-Level and App-Level
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. Read More...
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