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HLSL is the High Level Shading Language for DirectX, documented here . I was wondering the other day how you might use shaders in Office, and this led me to build a little proof-of-concept that allows you to experiment with HLSL within the context of
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The eagerly-awaited update to Eric Carter and Eric Lippert’s VSTO book has been released this week. This is the definitive guide to Visual Studio Tools for Office, and this edition targets development for Excel, Word and Outlook 2007 using Visual Studio
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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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I’ve posted a few times on the best way to expose methods from an add-in to automation clients – for example, here , here and here . So far, in my examples, I’ve described very simple exposed methods that take no parameters – but what happens if you want
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Can you use a managed usercontrol in an Office document in the same way that you can use a native ActiveX control – all without using VSTO? Some time ago, I posted about how to use native ActiveX controls within a doc-level VSTO solution, by wrapping
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First a warning: this is an advanced scenario, and you should not attempt to use this technique unless you’re sure you know what you’re doing. The reason for this warning is that while the technique described here is pretty simple, it’s also easy to get
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Here at PDC, Misha Shneerson has just delivered a talk on a couple of very interesting new features provided by .NET 4.0. He did explain up front that these features have very broad applicability, but reading the session evals it's pretty obvious that
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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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Under the Hood: Advances in the .NET Type System This is one session you absolutely must not miss. It looks pretty innocuous, but it's actually a very big deal. This talk is an in-depth examination of some of the enhancements we're making in CLR v4.0
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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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Harry 'Play It Again Sam' Miller has posted a wonderfully funny video on this topic - with a serious message. You've got to check this one out: http://blogs.msdn.com/vsto/archive/2008/08/12/activating-a-custom-tab-on-the-ribbon-when-a-document-is-opened.aspx
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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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