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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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You can expose an arbitrary object from your add-in as a kind of extension to the Office host application’s object model. To do this, you set your object as the value of the Object property on the COMAddIn object that represents your add-in in the host’s
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In general, it is important that any code in a managed Office add-in should execute on the main UI thread. The reason for this is that there are several components that simply will not work when executed from any other but the main UI thread – examples
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I received an email from a customer the other day asking how to set up an Excel pivot table programmatically. The Excel OM exposes a number of objects and methods that you can use to create pivot tables, some more sophisticated than others. I wanted the
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In an earlier post , I talked about how you could delay (or prevent) the loading of managed code using a native add-in. In that post I also listed the standard LoadBehavior settings, and I was assuming that everyone knows how these apply, but I got a
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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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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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