.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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

I updated a very popular blog post I made several years ago with some little additions and corrections that I think make the process of creating a user defined function (e.g. a custom function to use in Excel formulas) easier to create in Visual Studio...

Steve Ballmer announced VSTO support for Outlook add-ins in his Tech-Ed keynote today. This is exciting news--VSTO Outlook add-ins solve all the problems people have encountered while trying to build managed COM add-ins for Outlook using IDTExtensibility2...

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...

The VSTO 'v3' CTP for Office 2007 Beta 2 is available now. Start playing with Office 2007 development and the next version of VSTO today. First you need to get Office 2007 Beta 2: http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/getthebeta.mspx Then...

From the team that brought you Visual Studio Tools for Office--we announced a new product today called Visual Studio Tools for Applications. Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA) is a .NET-based application customization technology designed to...

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...

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...

VSTO 2.0 has a feature that allows you to embed any WinForms control you want into an Excel spreadsheet or Word document. This lets you use lots of powerful WinForms controls in your Office solution. When you add a managed control to your document (by...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

As promised, I thought I'd report on my experience with the new Shimming wizards that I blogged about earlier . The wizards are available for download here . I've been working mainly with Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 and the 2.0 CLR. Silly me...