Kathleen McGrath's Weblog

As Maarten van Stam pointed out, the Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Mere Mortals book is available for pre-order on Amazon.com. Take a look at http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Studio-Tools-Office-Mortals/dp/0321426711/sr=1-2/qid=1157069826/ref=sr_1_2/102-3409571...

In my previous post , I described how you can re-use an image from an existing Word command on your Ribbon button. I've created a video screencast that demonstrates it. The file is 7 MB in size and is approximately 4 minutes long: ControlID Screencast...

The Visual Basic team just announced the availability of two Visual Basic 2005 Power Packs: Microsoft Interop Forms Toolkit 1.0 - Enables you to incorporate VB.NET Windows Forms into your VB6 applications. Microsoft PrintForm Component 1.0 - Enables...

Paul Stubbs recently participated in a podcast with Andrew Coates to discuss Office development. You can listen to the podcast here: Microsoft Developer Show #07 - Building Applications that Integrate with Office --Kathleen

The Microsoft Office Word Team has created a new blog . Jonathan Bailor added the first post, and plans to add some great information about user scenarios (and features) of Word 2007. Be sure to check it out. --Kathleen

Check out the new community development Web site, named CodePlex . “CodePlex is Microsoft's community development Web site. You can use CodePlex to create new projects to share with your fellow developers around the world, join others who...

If you haven't already visited the Coding4Fun Developer Center , you should! This site is for the hobbyist developer community and provides articles, code examples, and information about building cool applications with the Visual Studio Express editions...

As promised, I've created a number of video screencasts for the Visual Basic hobbyist. If you're new to Visual Basic, you'll want to take a look at these videos. The videos are from the Creating Your First Visual Basic Program section of the Visual Basic...

The VSTO team just released Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Second Edition Beta (VSTO 2005 SE Beta) (aka "Cypress"). See the announcement here . VSTO 2005 SE Beta is a free add-on for Visual Studio that allows you to create application-level customizations...

In Chapter 14 of VSTO for Mere Mortals , we describe how to customize the ribbon. When you customize the ribbon, you might want to re-use an existing button image. In VBA, you had to look up the FaceID for the control, and there wasn't an easy way to...

I learned from Harry Miller , and from an article in the Seattle Times , that Microsoft has a new video sharing service called Soapbox on MSN Video . It's currently in Beta and you must request an invitation to participate. I hope I get an invite soon...

Paul Stubbs has posted two interesting articles about Unit Testing for VSTO using Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Testers (VSTS). Check them out: Unit Testing for VSTO (part 1 Manual Tests) Unit Testing for VSTO (part 2 Automated Tests...

The Made in Express Contest has selected the Grand Prize, First Prize (2), and Community Choice winners for applications created with Visual Studio Express. Learn more on Dan Fernandez's blog posting. --Kathleen

Joe Morel recently announced the creation of two new community chat forums. These are not the typical Q&A forums you're used to; instead, they're meant to be an area where you can discuss the latest technologies or share your applications with the...

The Coding4Fun site is being redesigned. See the conceptual designs for the home page on Dan Fernandez's blog. It's a "popularity contest," so vote for your favorite one! --Kathleen

Learn how you can add .NET functionality to your existing VB 6 applications using the Microsoft Interop Forms Toolkit 1.0 . I've posted a video screencast on the VB Team blog. --Kathleen