.NET4Office

If I was to go work for another team inside Microsoft right now, I think the team I’d be most tempted to work for is the Outlook team. Why?—because in my opinion at least, Outlook is the next big emerging developer platform at Microsoft...

Chris Kunicki posts a funny blog about how he originally provided some luke-warm feedback on the VSTO 2.0 feature where we put the Word/Excel document right inside the Visual Studio frame. Now he's seen the error of his ways and loves the feature :) ...

This is kind of like the story where the mother tells her kids “While I’m gone, don't climb up onto the countertop, open the cupboard door, take the beans off the top shelf, and stuff the beans up your nose." I’m going to tell you something...

Sam Gentile blogs about ReleaseComObject --between Sam and Andrew Whitechapel I think they have covered this area well. However, from the standpoint of Office development and add-ins for Word, Excel, etc., the best policy is to stay out of DefaultDomain...

Clearly today is ActionsPane day! Paul Cornell blogs on VSTO2 support for putting custom UI into the Office Task Pane . In this case, he gives an example incorporating Word, the calendar control, bookmarks, and Visual Studio Tools for Office 2.0...

Chris Kunicki --Office developer extraordinaire-- blogs about Smart Documents VSTO2 style . VSTO2 makes it super easy to put your custom winforms UI into the Office Task Pane--like 1 line of code easy (repeatedly press Ctrl+F1 while inside of Word...

Paul Cornell blogs about the view controls we create for you in VSTO 2.0 when you have XML structure in your Word document . A couple of additional notes I would add: UpdateXML: One of the cool additional things we added to XMLNode is a new method...

Kathleen McGrath is doing an MSDN webcast on VSTO 2.0 and Word tomorrow, Tuesday April 27th, at 11 AM PST. Description: “This webcast will demonstrate how to use the new actions pane, provided by Microsoft® Visual Studio® Tools for...

PC Magazine posts 106 tips and tricks for Office . There's so many obscure things here that I've never heard of--like holding down the shift key when picking the file menu in Word--it gives you a “Close All” command. Someone should put...

Paul Cornell blogs about cached data in VSTO 2.0 . I gotta tell you—cached data is one of features I’m most excited about in VSTO 2.0. First some background: Office programming is different from traditional WinForms programming...

Paul Cornell blogs about the view controls we create for you in VSTO 2.0 when you schema map a schema into a word document.

Andrew May blogs about some great news. OneNote 2003 SP1 will have a simple object model . All you frustrated programmers wanting to integrate with OneNote--here's your chance!

Want an easy way to learn about Visual Studio Tools for Office 2003 (1.0)? First, get your hands on a copy of Visual Studio Tools for Office 1.0 and install it. It is part of MSDN Universal or can be purchased separately. It doesn't install with the...

Chris Kunicki has a great blog entry on why to use VSTO . This post is several weeks old, but still worth the link. There is a lot of value in VSTO 1.0--I've been blogging a lot about VSTO 2.0, but I will try to add some more information about VSTO...

I wrote in some detail about view controls earlier. My hope in this entry is to give you a slightly higher level view of the programming model and to introduce the concept of views. To begin, we will examine the programming model created in VSTO...

Andrew Whitechapel posts an exhaustive blog on when to use ReleaseComObject in Office add-ins. Bottom line for me: “If you’re sharing an AppDomain with someone else you should probably never RCO, because other components in the AppDomain...

We had some interesting bugs recently in VSTO 2.0 that basically involve letting the product sit for a while--like over lunch break--without doing anything. Testers and devs hate this kind of a bug: Do X, do Y, wait 5-15 minutes, do Z. But if you are...

Recently there was a little bit of a ruckus about the correct way to talk to the Word object model in C# when it comes to missing arguments. If you've ever used the Word PIAs with C# (Primary Interop Assemblies) you will be familiar with the coding practice...

Host controls are at the heart of the VSTO 2.0 programming model. What are they, how and when do you create them, and what do they do for you? What is a Host Control? We provide several host controls in the VSTO 2.0 programming model. For Excel, we...

I talked to a Really Smart Guy TM at Microsoft yesterday about community and Microsoft's efforts in the community. The question I was trying to get answered was--is Microsoft approaching community in the right way? Would a Microsoft employee's time...

Eric Lippert, who has singlehandedly done more for purple Lucida Sans Unicode than anyone I know, links to my blog http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlippert/archive/2004/04/09/110556.aspx . Although he's got plenty to blog about already, hopefully he will...

I hinted at View Controls and what they are in a previous post. I plan to blog some more about them. In the mean time if you want to read to the end of the story, there's an interesting article on one of the view controls we create for Word in VSTO...

Siew Moi Khor, who is an awesome contributor to the Office development community, points this out about the shim approach: “Using the shim also means the config file can be placed in the same directory as the assembly, instead of the office app...

I just realized that I should maybe provide a little better idea of who I am and what I do. My name is Eric Carter--I'm a Development Lead at Microsoft. My team and I are currently working on Visual Studio Tools for Office 2.0. My team (which fortunately...

You may have noticed my “I'll be there” picture.. I'll be there--isn't that like a really bad Michael Bolton song or something of that ilk? Anywhoo, I'll be at Tech-Ed this year talking about VSTO 2.0 mainly, but I'm sure I can help you...