A couple months ago Robert Green , VSTO MVP, started a series of step-by-step tutorials on building on Office 2007. Part 4 is now published. Thanks Robert! In this fourth part of the series of tutorials on Office Business Applications, learn how to create an Excel 2007 solution using Visual Studio 2008...

A couple months ago Robert Green , VSTO MVP, started a series of tutorials on building on Office 2007. Yesterday we published part 3 of his step-by-step tutorials. Thanks Robert! In this third part of the series of tutorials on Office Business Applications, learn how to create an Excel 2007 solution...

Last month Robert Green , VSTO MVP, started a series of tutorials on building on Office 2007. Today we published part 2 of his step-by-step tutorials. Thanks Robert! In this second part of the series of tutorials on Office Business Applications, learn how to create a Word 2007 price quote generation...

If you’re in the Bay Area, come on out to downtown SF where Robin will be talking about Outlook Add-ins tonight. Create a custom Outlook Add-In using VSTO When :  Wednesday, 11/18/2009 at 6:30 PM Where : Microsoft San Francisco Office, 835 Market Street, Suite 700, San Francisco Visual Studio 2008...

Couple weeks ago when I was in Holland speaking at SDC an attendee asked me how he could call methods in an Office solution (VSTO) from VBA functions defined in a document and vice versa. I thought I’d follow up with a post on how to do this, but first a little background on why this architecture would...

This month Dev Pro Connections has an article by Milind Lele on using Sync Services in a WPF application: Building Occasionally Connected Smart Clients with WPF With Sync Services and Visual Studio 2008 you can visually design your local data cache and have it automatically synchronize your data with...

I just started catching up on a cool series on Channel 9: The Visual Studio Documentary The documentary kicks off by taking you back to the days of MS-DOS and Alan Cooper who originally sold Visual Basic to Bill Gates back in 1988. It has a lot of BASIC and Windows history and it’s pretty fun to watch...

I finally made my way back home from Europe and I’m still digging through all my email, newsletters, feeds, etc. But one of the items that grabbed my attention is this week Karl Shifflett released updated XAML Power Tools for Visual Studio 2008 as well as a new set for Visual Studio 2010 : Updated: XAML...

Yesterday I posted about how we could create a letter generator (mail merge) that took data from a database to create a Word 2007 document using the System.IO.Packaging class. I showed how to take data from Northwind using a single LINQ query to create XDocument objects representing letters to customers...

With the release of Microsoft Office 2007 we can work with a much simpler, standard, XML format called Open XML which opens the door for many types of applications that cannot work via COM. What if you needed to build a scalable web service that processes many documents in high volume? What if you wanted...

Yesterday John posted on the Visual Studio Data blog how to Refresh the Primary Key Identity Column during an Insert Operation using SQL Server. In that post he shows how the DataSet designer sets up a batch Insert statement to retrieve identity keys automatically. A while back I wrote about how to insert...

Last week I installed Windows 7 Enterprise on my main laptop – a Lenovo T60p ThinkPad. I was up in Redmond and MSIT made it available via a super-easy network boot that installs Office Enterprise, all the IT-required software like anti-virus, and all the drivers you need automatically. (I can’t say enough...

Yesterday we released a couple more videos onto the Visual Basic Developer Center on building WPF data-entry forms with Entity Framework: How Do I: Hook Up and Display Validation in WPF using Entity Framework? How Do I: Build a WPF Master-Detail Data Entry Form Using Entity Framework? That makes 5 videos...

The Winforms ReportViewer in Visual Studio Pro will allow you define client reports with a variety of data sources. If you’re not familiar with creating client-side reports using the ReportViewer, take a look at these videos: How Do I: Create a report from a database? How Do I: Create a report from a...

This month I have an article on DevProConnections: Taking Advantage of LINQ and XML in Microsoft Office 2007 In this article, I talk about how a lot of applications that need to take advantage of Microsoft Office can do so without going through COM. Many programs that need to process documents...

I just finished a couple more How Do I videos on using EF with WPF using VS2008 SP1 (they’ll be published soon) and while I was translating my VB code to C# I stumbled upon an error in C# that does not happen in VB. This of course got me curious and so I thought I’d share what I found out. I have an...

I was cleaning up my desk today and in the piles of mail and gobs of paper I found the SDN Magazine “Women in Technology” issue 101 that featured an article I wrote that was released in print back in May. Well, I just noticed today that near the end of June they made most of the articles available online...

In this post and video I’ve shown folks how to work with a local database file (.mdf, .mdb, .sdf) that resides directly inside your project in order to see updates made while debugging your application. If it looks like everything saves fine while debugging, but you can’t see the updates if you look...

If you’re like me and used to having line & shape controls , PrintForm and a handy DataRepeater as part of your toolbox then you’ll be excited to know that these controls are also going to be installed with Visual Studio 2010. On Friday, Yunfeng Dong mentioned on the VS Data team blog that the VB...

Since my last post on filtering child collections using Entity Framework , I have had more than a few emails about how to load filtered child DataTables that are part of a master-detail relationship and then get them to save properly through the TableAdapters. Many people are running into the problem...

Ever wonder what really happens when you write a simple LINQ query? Dim query = From row In db.Customers _ Where row.Country = "Canada" _ Select row A lot of new language features went into the compilers in Visual Studio 2008 to make even this simple LINQ query work. In this interview...

Last post I talked about how to get WPF data binding to work with master-detail entity collections. I had a couple readers ask me how they could filter the child collection instead of bringing them all down so in this post I’d like to show how you could do that. It’s actually pretty easy. Customer (Master...

I’ve blogged before about implementing validation on LINQ to SQL classes as well as how to customize the display of error messages in WPF . In this post I want to show how you can use these same techniques to validate entities coming from the Entity Framework (EF). Like LINQ to SQL classes, Entity Framework...

If you haven’t seen it yet, we’ve got a new article from Robert Green (VSTO MVP) up on the Visual Basic and VSTO Dev Centers . In this article, learn how you can use Visual Basic to build application-level add-ins that automate common Microsoft Office tasks. It’s a good introduction to Office development...

Last week I spoke at DevTeach in Vancouver which was held at the beautiful Four Seasons in downtown. I love this Canadian conference because the attendees are great – super friendly and social, and ask a lot of great questions. I mostly interacted with folks building applications for the government or...