A reader writes: I've enjoyed reading your online blog about Excel/Dotnet integration. I have a question, that if anyone would know the answer to, hopefully you do. Is there any trick that can be used to speed up insertion of large blocks of data into a worksheet from dotnet? For example, I may have...

VSTO takes a very strong stance on security to prevent the spread of macro viruses or worms. VSTO's security model involves the trust of two things: 1) the assembly associated with the document must be trusted and 2) the location the document is coming from must be trusted. VSTO's default security model...

Visual Studio Tools for Office is really taking off and the team that creates VSTO is growing fast. If you are interested in working at Microsoft and helping us build tools to help developers build customizations for Office, please check out this list of openings on the VSTO team: http://ericca.members...

Kathleen has just posted two new videos showing how VSTO's Data Binding Features work. I guarantee you'll be wowed by these videos. The first shows the creation of a databound list and controls in Excel created by simply dragging and dropping. The second shows how to create databound bookmarks in a Word...

If you haven't checked it out yet, Chris Kunicki has created a VSTO Zone at his site that has a bunch of useful information about VSTO: http://www.officezealot.com/vsto/ Also, Kathleen has posted some more VSTO video tutorials: Demo 5--How to Resize Excel Controls D e mo 6 - How to Add Controls to the...

Items in a Word collection are accessed in two different ways depending on whether the index into the collection is strongly typed or weakly typed. In the case of the KeyBindings collection for example, the index is strongly typed as an integer. As such, you can use the index operation ([]) to get to...

I've updated this article with some new guidance-- for the details, see this post . Excel enables the creation of user defined functions that can be used in Excel formulas. A developer must create a special kind of DLL called an XLL. Excel also allows you to write custom functions in VBA that can...

This seems like a reasonable piece of code: For Each oCell As Excel.Range In Me.Range("a1:b5") oCell.Value = "test" Next so does this: foreach Excel.CustomProperty prop in worksheet.CustomProperties { Console.WriteLine(prop.Name); } Unfortunately, when you run this code you will get a "Missing member...

Kathleen has created two new videos you should check out. Nice! Demo 5--How to Resize Excel Controls D e mo 6 - How to Add Controls to the Actions Pane

[EDITOR'S NOTE] Blogging has been slow as we are spending almost all our time getting Beta 2 out the door. You may have had the experience of Excel or Word causing an Office Watson error at debug time when you have an exception that occurs in your Windows Forms event handlers in VSTO 2005. The problem...

I've been doing some C# development with the Excel object model and when you look at Excel objects in the object browser or in intellisense there are two major problems you run into: 1) Methods that would be hidden in VBA are shown in the object browser when using C#. You really probably shouldn't be...

This is a frequent question that comes up. You develop a managed add-in or VSTO 2003 code behind. You show a windows form and yuck--it looks like Windows XP never happened. The buttons aren't pretty like the Windows XP buttons. Everything looks circa Windows 95. The trick is you have to tell Windows...

If you haven't had a chance yet to see these great videos that Kathleen has made of VSTO in action, check them out. They're each about 6 minutes long are are really nice glimpses into some of the cool features of VSTO 2005. Keep 'em coming Kathleen! Demo 1 – Locate and Delete NamedRange Controls Demo...

I recently posted some code showing how to get Outlook to shut down. I contended that you shouldn't have to call ReleaseCOMObject as is shown in some MSDN articles to get Outlook to shut down. Indeed, David Mortenson who has worked on interop here at Microsoft warns further about ReleaseCOMObject . One...

Another new article on MSDN about VSTO 2005 --this time by J. Jason De Lorme. Jason mentions that VSTO 2005 doesn't support complex databinding against XMLNodes. We did add an "UpdateXML" method (renamed to LoadXML in Beta 2) on an XMLNode that should make some of the tasks you do with XML in Word easier...

There's a great new article on MSDN with lots-o-pretty-pictures on what's new in VSTO 2005. Check it out here .

I’ve had a number of people ask me how to get Outlook to shutdown properly when you create a managed add-in for it. I alluded to this issue briefly in my last blog . The OnDisconnection method you implement in your add-in’s implementation of IDTExtensibility2 doesn’t get called if you have outstanding...

A quick plug for another way to get your hands on VSTO 1.0. If you haven't picked up VSTO yet, you should check out Visual Studio .NET 2003 Special Edition . It includes a bunch of extra goodies including Visual Tools for Office 2003 which was previously "sold separately".

I've talked at some length in this blog about the importance of shimming your managed add-in so it can live in its own appdomain and not do damage to other add-ins. Also, while I'm on the topic, please don't force a particular version of the CLR--always load the latest version available of the CLR. Anyway...

I've updated officewiki ( http://www.officewiki.net ) to include PIA documentation for the PowerPoint PIAs. Go to http://www.officewiki.net/default.aspx/PowerPoint.PowerPointIndex to see the main PowerPoint index.

Mai-lan , a lead PM on the Visio team, has started blogging about Visio development issues including tips for .NET development against Visio. She recently blogged about how to improve performance of Visio solutions . Check it out. Also, you should check out the new MSDN articles, sample code, and tools...

[Thanks to Mohit Gupta for his code examples that I quote in this entry] We changed how simple data binding works in VSTO 2.0 Beta 2 from the Beta 1 behavior. As you may know, simple data binding in VSTO 2.0--say binding an Excel named range to a "Name" column from a customers table--is basically one...

[Editors note: Blogging is slow right now because we are really heads down trying to get Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2005 ready for you.] You may have run into this issue in Beta1 of Visual Studio 2005. I thought I might blog about it. If you wrote this code which automates Excel in say a console application...

One of the mysteries in Excel customization code that I see written by C# developers is the use of the "Value2" property to set the value of a Range in Excel. Why do C# developers use this wacky Value2 property? Most VB programs you see written against Excel use the Value property instead of the Value2...

In my previous post I wrote this--but then removed it: "Note that the Office XP PIAs will work against either Office XP or Office 2003. This is because the PIAs are backed by the COM object models of Office that are versioned in such a way that the OM of Office XP is a proper subset of the OM of Office...