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VSTO Add-ins (RSS)
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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People have been building native shared add-ins for Office (and related apps) since their introduction in Office 2000. People have been building managed shared add-ins since the introduction of .NET in 2002. VSTO support for managed add-ins was introduced
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Suppose you control your enterprise desktops to the extent that you control which add-ins are installed. Suppose, further, that you want to avoid the hit of loading the CLR at application startup. One way is to delay-load your managed add-ins. The registered
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Perusing the forums over the last few months, it’s clear that there’s some confusion about the various VSTO loader and runtime components. At the time of writing, there are 4 versions of VSTO in existence, including 4 sets of design-time tooling and 3.5
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Everyone knows you can build document-level Office solutions and you can build application-level Office add-ins. Suppose your requirements dictate that you build a solution that uses both techniques – can this be done? First, let’s pause and consider
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In my previous post , I looked at how the VSTO add-in model is flexible enough to be used in prototyping scenarios for versions of Office not yet released. In principle, the same applies to Office host applications that are not currently supported. VSTO
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Following on from my previous post , it should be clear that we've designed the VSTO Office add-in support to be optimally useful across multiple different Office host applications and spanning multiple Office versions. To be very clear, let me reiterate:
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Or, Prototyping VSTO Add-ins for Unsupported Office Versions/Applications It is in the nature of the VSTO 2005 SE and VSTO 2008 add-ins that they will run in multiple versions of Office. One of the main reasons for designing them this way is to mitigate
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There's an article in this month's MSDN magazine on building Office-based solutions using VSTO with WPF, WCF and LINQ. The point of the article is to affirm that all these disparate technologies do indeed work well together, and that the design-time experience
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Suppose you want to build a Ribbon customization, or a custom task pane, and you want to use this customization in multiple add-ins? For example, you might want to use the same customization in say an Excel add-in and a PowerPoint add-in. It's pretty
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Here is a guest post by Eric Faller, Ribbon developer guru and all-round nice guy. It's a follow-up to my post about converting between the image formats used by Office and the .NET framework. I’ll be talking about handling the alpha channel (transparency)
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Can you use WPF controls in VSTO solutions, and if so, how? VSTO's mission is to bring together the unmanaged Office platform and the managed development world. One aspect of this is the ability to build VSTO solutions that use managed controls within
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This is an interesting manifestation of the gap between COM-based native servers, such as the Office client apps, and managed code. There are a number of scenarios where you need to convert image formats between the native COM-based IPictureDisp and the
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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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