.NET4Office

I wanted to make sure everyone knows that VB code samples for the VSTO for Office 2007 book are now available. You can download them here: http://www.informit.com/content/images/9780321533210/downloads/VB%20Code%20Listings.zip Long live VB!

To get started, from the Project menu choose Add New Item. In the Add New Item dialog box, click Ribbon (Visual Designer). Then click the Add button. A new Ribbon is created and the Ribbon Designer is displayed. Next, click on the Group control that is...

Prior to Visual Studio 2008 SP1, you couldn’t use common VSTO features like controls in the document and databinding to list objects at the add-in level.  But with SP1 we introduced a way for you to use these features at the add-in level.  In...

Another thing I want my bug tracking system to do is help me generate a weekly report with a summary table of key stats for all my teams. I want to do this in Word so I can add my own comments and a status summary of what went on during the week. We already...

We are now going to convert our previous sample to use cached data.  In our current solution we have code that when the document loads, it calls a web service to get the bug data.  We are going to use the cached data feature to allow us to call...

The next step is to get more of the bug data into Excel so we can start to analyze it.  To do this, we will use VSTO’s data bind to ListObject support. I’m going to approach this in a different “more advanced” way that will make sense later in the...

Now that we have our web service, lets get started by writing a managed UDF that uses the web method “GetColumnValue”.  In fact, the UDF will mirror this web method and make it so we can use it in Excel formulas. First, add a new C# or VB class library...

Within Microsoft, there is a web service already implemented that I can use in my solution to call the bug tracking system and get back the data described in the previous article.  For my demo, I’m going to implement a demo web service that will...

For my TechEd demo today, I will be showing a solution that helps me to do part of my job as a development manager: tracking the bug counts in the product. At Microsoft, we have an internal system that tracks a ton of relevant bug stats in TFS and takes...

Saurabh blogs about how to work around an error you get if you published a VSTO solution using VS2008 on a machine running the Windows 7 RC and then you try to install the solution on any machine you will see the following error: “The required version...

I will be at TechEd next week and will present a session on advanced VSTO: OFC324 Advanced Microsoft Office Word and Excel 2007 Development in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 with Visual Studio Tools for Office Eric Carter Thursday 5/14/2009 1:00PM-2...

This post examines how to build research services for Word and other Office applications. Word has a task pane called the Research task pane that enables you to enter a search term and search various sources for that search term. To display the Research...

There are some great VSTO community activities going on in Vienna.  Office Community Day is being held on May 8th in Vienna and is free.  They will be covering: Introduction to VSTO OpenXML Deployment in VSTO SharePoint Workflows and more. ...

New in Word 2007, content controls can be inserted into a document to provide more structure and control—for example when you have a section of the document that you want to allow the user to put a picture into or pick a value from a drop-down list. There...

There a lot of changes between Excel 2003 and Excel 2007 for developers.  Here are some highlights that I found interesting in the object model.  Note that you should use the trick I blog about in this post for more detailed comparisons . ...

It is instructive to compare code from the previous edition of my book to see what changed between Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 as well as the changes to the add-in model between VSTO 2.0 and VSTO 3.0.   This is a VSTO Outlook add-in that handles...

The C# code listings for the VSTO 2007 book are attached to this post. I will also get them posted to the book site in the next several days. Enjoy!

One common pattern of Office development is the Office Automation Executable—a console or windows forms application that starts up an Office application and talks to it.  Sometimes you won’t want to start a new instance of an Office application but...

With VSTO 3.0 in Visual Studio 2008, there are a lot of new features and it can be a bit of a challenge to keep track of what’s enabled for what application. The table below comes from my new book and shows the Office 2007 applications that are supported...

I stumbled upon a couple of good posts about getting VSTO projects to build on a continuous integration machine that doesn’t have Visual Studio installed on it. Unfortunately we do not make this very easy to do, but these bloggers provide some help: Rinat...

I’m excited to announce that I have completed a new book on VSTO 2008 and Office 2007 that is hot off the presses.  I just got a copy in the mail and as my editor said, it’s a “big baby”, 1055 pages of VSTO 3.0 goodness. This book was an interesting...

Saw a weird bug in VSTO this weekend as I was setting up a new home machine (Quad core—woohoo!). After I installed VSTO, I got this in the new projects dialog: Version2003 and Version2007 were displayed rather than 2003 and 2007. Turns out that...

Scott Hanselman blogs on a simple VSTO Outlook add-in to disable the Reply To All and Forward buttons in Outlook .

I really liked David Crow's post on building the next Xobni --has lots of practical advise about both the business and value adds OBAs can make as well as some good links to articles for beginners.

Note that the approach described in this article is not supported by Microsoft. The GetVstoObject method is designed to be used primarily in application-level add-ins. Using this method in the way described in this article is an undocumented feature that...