.NET4Office

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...

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...

The June CTP of Visual Studio 2005 is now live on MSDN. In this build, you will find that VSTO has added a feature to address the Excel LCID or Locale issue. What is the Excel Locale issue? Well, if you run a VSTO customization for Excel on a machine...

A developer on my team was recently trying to set the contents of a small column of excel cells to an array of values. This is a desirable thing to do—if you are setting a range of values in Excel, it is much better to create an array and make one...

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...

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...

Just when I thought it was safe to write .NET code in Excel, Mohit Gupta and Eric Lippert opened up for me a whole new world of horrible world of dates in Excel. Mohit recently added code similar to this snippet to our code tree to convert Excel dates...

If you are lucky enough to be attending PDC, there are going to be lots of VSTO goodies for you to check out. There will be a lot of information on VSTO 2.0 including an entire day preconference on VSTO 2.0 ( PRE10 ). In addition, PDC is the time to announce...

Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 is available today and with it, a new age of Office development begins. Visual Studio Professional 2008 now includes all the Office projects previously only in the Visual Studio Tools for Office or Visual Studio Team System products...

Have you ever looked at the Excel PIA “Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel” using the object browser in Visual Studio and just been blown away and confused by what you see there? For example, consider what .NET Interop does to the simple...

[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...

Someone on the team was looking to use VSTO 2005 SE to display a context menu in Outlook 2007 when you right-click on a mail item to delete all related mail items. I put together some quick and dirty code that shows how to do this. The interesting things...

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...

One commonly asked for feature in VSTO is the ability to use Word document and Excel workbook features in Application-level add-in projects. Starting with Visual Studio 2008 SP1, there is now a mechanism to use many of the document-level features in your...

Today at the Office Developer Conference in Redmond, Bill Gates announced the immediate availability of a Community Technology Preview of Visual Studio Tools for Office 'v3'. This CTP release works against the Beta 1 Technical Refresh of Microsoft Office...

I'm looking for a strong developer with C++ & C# skills to work on the next version of VSTO. I am the hiring manager for this position. Submit your resume via my contact link: http://blogs.msdn.com/eric_carter/contact.aspx Visual Studio Tools for...

I'm not sure if people realize how significant the fixing of the Excel locale issue is that I blogged about earlier: http://blogs.msdn.com/eric_carter/archive/2005/06/15/429515.aspx This has been a huge adoption blocker for writing managed code against...

This has become a frequently asked question--where are the Office PIAs? The Office XP PIAs are available here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=C41BD61E-3060-4F71-A6B4-01FEBA508E52&displaylang=en The Office 2003 PIAs are available...

At PDC we showed an early alpha build of VSTO v3 that gave attendees an idea of where VSTO v3 is going. Here are some of the early themes of VSTO v3: Works with Office 12 VSTO v3 will target Office 12. We plan to make all the features in VSTO...

A common issue that occurs in add-in development goes like this. “I just pressed F5 on my add-in project and nothing happens! My add-in doesn’t appear to load. What’s the deal”? Office has a system to protect itself from Add-ins gone wild. Once you understand...

If you haven't downloaded it yet, you must download the Microsoft IntelliSense XML Files for Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System Solution Developers . This download is a must have for any Visual Studio Tools for Office 2003 or...

You may be aware that there isn't documentation available right now for the Office PIA's (Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.dll, Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.dll, and Microsoft.Office.Core.dll). There will be official Microsoft documentation available at...

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...

When you look at the Excel PIA in the object browser in Visual Studio, you will quickly notice what appears to be method centric name calling: a slew of methods with the text “Dummy” in them. There's even an interface called IDummy (implement...

Well, PDC has started. We had a great pre-conference session on VSTO that was well attended--it was fun to show the almost final builds of VSTO 2005 knowing that we're almost to the end of this long journey to get VSTO 2005 released. I can't wait for...