.NET4Office

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...

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...

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...

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...

Thomas Williams asks “When is .NET for Office..I’m sick of using VBA!” Good question! To some extent, .NET for Office is here today. This year, my team released a new product in the Visual Studio product family with the mind-numbingly...

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...

Currently, one of the greatest obstacles faced by Office developers is the difficulty of using the Office object model. Just calling the object model the “Office object model” is incorrect—it is really several separate object models...

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...

WRT the problem of the abstraction bar being set wrong in the Office object model, here are two good “bad” examples, and a good “good” example of where the abstraction bar could be moved to. Currently, to create a table in Word...

A member of my team, Muhammad Arrabi, is giving an MSDN webcast tomorrow on VSTO 2. http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=25936 Go give him a hard time for me J MSDN Webcast: Data and Databinding with Visual Studio Tools for Office Version 2...

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...

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...

Andrew Whitechapel has some interesting advise on using ReleaseCOMObject when writing managed code that automates office: http://blogs.officezealot.com/whitechapel/ . Andrew knows a lot about COM interop against Office and I trust what he says. But...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

In the past, the only option an Office programmer had when developing a customized document was to write code against the generic general purpose API provided by the Office application. As part of VSTO 2.0, we generate a view and data programming model...

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...

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

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...