Andrew Whitechapel

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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. ...

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...

The Visual Studio team is growing and we have several exciting developer positions open! If you’re looking for big challenges, if you’re driven to innovate, if you are looking for big impact and responsibilities, then you can join us. We are...

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...

I've been thinking more about calling unmanaged XLL UDFs from managed code than about managed automation add-ins lately, but an automation add-in issue came up the other day, and I thought I'd throw it out there. If you want to build managed UDFs without...

We're 26 days away from the 2008 Office Developer Conference . I've been roped in to talk about the VSTO/VSTA Power Tools – all of which are useful, and some of which are actually very interesting. Remember, the ODC is open to the public for the first...

In my previous post , I looked at how to build a VSTO add-in that invokes native XLL UDFs via the Excel COM OM (specifically, Application.Run). In this second part, I'll look at the same managed client calling the same XLL UDFs via the Windows API instead...

As part of a little ongoing investigation, I wanted to communicate between a managed add-in and a native XLL UDF. As I was writing this up, it turned out to be a much longer post that I planned, so I've split it into two parts (I'll post the second part...

As part of a little investigation I'm doing at present, I needed to build some simple native XLLs for testing purposes. This was the first time I had a need to build XLLs since the Excel XLL SDK was updated back in September. The updated Excel 2007 XLL...

Hard on the heels of the Office DevCon, we've just announced the dates for the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2008 . Heads-up below. When : October 27–30, 2008, Pre-conference October 26, 2008 Where : Los Angeles Convention Center , Los...