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Andrew Whitechapel

Visual Studio, Office and other Nonsense

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Creating a PivotTable Programmatically
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 Read More...
Demand-Loading VSTO Add-ins
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 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...
PDC 2008 Open for Registration
It’s been 3 years since the last Professional Developers Conference, so I’m pleased that we’re doing one this year – it’s about time. This year’s PDC is on Mon-Fri Oct 27-30, with a one-day pre-con on Sun Oct-26, at the Los Angeles Convention Center (same 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...
The Case For Shared Add-ins
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 Read More...
Delay-loading the CLR in Office Add-ins
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 Read More...
VSTO Loader and Runtime Components
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 Read More...
Integrating Doc-level and Add-in Solutions
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 Read More...
ActiveX Controls in VSTO Solutions
In the past, before it became strategically acceptable to build Office-based solutions in managed code, it was common for people to build such solutions using pure COM technologies. They built native COM add-ins, using C/C++, or they built document-level Read More...
VSTO Power Tools
I announced the release of v1 of the VSTO/VSTA Power Tools last time , and they've been getting quite a bit of use so far. The downloads are here - these include an overview document. Note that the documentation for the individual tools is installed in Read More...
VSTO/VSTA Power Tools v1.0
As I announced at the Office Developers Conference in San Jose this week, we’re releasing a set of power tools that complement the developer’s experience when building Office-based or VSTA-based solutions. These tools are freely downloadable here . We’re Read More...
VSTO Add-ins for Access?
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 Read More...
Add-ins for Office 14
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: Read More...
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