Kathleen McGrath's Weblog

One of my favorite features in the latest version of VSTO is the Ribbon Designer . The Ribbon Designer makes it easy to customize the Ribbon in your Office applications. In VSTO 2005 SE, you could add a Ribbon Item to your project and then add XML markup...

Gathering customer feedback is a critical part of the Visual Studio documentation process. Your feedback helps us determine whether we are writing the type of content that is most useful to you, and whether we are covering the tasks and scenarios that...

One of the nice things about working at Microsoft is that you have the opportunity to work on several different products. First, I wrote documentation for VSTO 2005 and VSTA. Most recently, I wrote documentation for both Visual Basic 2008 Express Edition...

This videos gives you an introduction to the ActionsPane using Visual Studio Tools for Office....

In addition to writing documentation for the professional VB developer, I'll be updating the Visual Basic Express documentation set. This documentation shows folks that are new to Visual Basic 2005 (whether you're migrating your skills from VB6, are new...

The latest version of VSTO (VSTO 2005 SE) is available for download. You can use VSTO 2005 SE to create add-ins for both Office 2003 and the 2007 Microsoft Office System. VSTO 2005 SE helps you easily customize the new UI features of the 2007 Microsoft...

Learn how to to create a custom task pane that automates Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007. In this Visual How to , Harry shows you how to create a custom task pane that inserts dates into a slide when the user clicks a MonthCalendar control that is on...

I'm a big fan of Visual Basic. When I was a writer on the VSTO team, we always wrote our code examples in both C# and Visual Basic; samples that shipped with the product also had a fair mix of C# and Visual Basic. Sometimes, if you look at the Visual...

I know, I know...I haven't posted many new video demos since starting this blog. I've had a lot of changes happening lately, and I've been spending a lot of time finishing up work on the Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office for Mere Mortals book. We added...

The top customer requests from the Visual Studio Content Survey are to improve search and F1. Well, improvements to Help are on the way! The Server and Tools Business division has created a team of engineers dedicated to improving the Help experience...

Have you visited the MSDN Library lately? There’s a new default view applied to the Library content that is known as the “Lightweight view.” This is a slimmed down view that has the following features: Flattened Table of Contents . Instead of having several...

Mick Alberts and I have created a series of getting started videos for Visual Basic and C#.  The first set of videos correspond to the getting started tutorial: Tutorial 1: Create a Picture Viewer .  If you’re new to Visual Basic or C# development...

In this posting, I’ll show you results from Visual Studio Content Survey for questions related to how customers find Help, whether they give feedback on documentation (and if not, why not!), and general feedback given on the documentation. Note that the...

Hi, so I thought I should introduce myself. I’m Kathleen McGrath and while this is my first blog, I have been blogging about VSTO for the past 3 years. I really like VSTO, having come from a VBA developer background and I’m even more excited about it...

Lisa Feigenbaum shows Beth Massi new IntelliSense features in Visual Basic 2008. There are a lot of new features, including keyword IntelliSense, expression lists, and syntax tips that you will definitely want to learn about. View on Channel9...

This screencast shows you how to customize the Ribbon in Excel using VSTO 2005 SE. You'll see how to use the new Ribbon support item in Visual Studio to add a group and toggleButton to the Add-ins tab of the Ribbon, and how to further customize it. ...

This screencast shows you how to customize the Ribbon in Word 2007, by adding a new group of controls to the Home tab. View Video Download Video (Right-click link) The video is 03:10 minutes in length, and 8 MB in size. --Kathleen

The new content controls in Word 2007 are great for a number of reasons: Drag and Drop . With VSTO, you can add the different types of content controls to the document in the same way you'd add controls to a Windows Form: by dragging them from the...

Recently, I posted an entry about my favorite VSTO feature : the Ribbon Designer. In Beta 2 of VSTO, there are a lot more controls available, so I've created a new video that shows you how to use some of these controls. View Video Download Video...

When you customize the ribbon with the June CTP of VSTO, it can be difficult to identify errors in your XML markup. Because XML is case-sensitive, it is easy to introduce errors and can be difficult to find exactly where in your mark up the error occurs...

I’m planning on attending Tech*Ed Developers in June to gather more feedback on Visual Studio documentation. Last time I provided a survey, we got a lot of great feedback about the docs, but the majority of the comments were about the Help experience...

The Visual Studio Content team has created a new content type called Video How Tos. The Video How Tos enable you to watch videos that correspond to written how-to and walkthrough topics in the Visual Studio 2008 documentation. The documentation and Video...

This week, I'm featuring the topic Auto-Implemented Properties , which enables you to quickly specify a property of a class without having to write code to Get and Set the property. I recently interviewed Doug Rothaus, the author of this topic, to...

Here's a few pointers to articles that will get you started learning about some of the new features in Visual Studio 2008 SP1. New Features in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Learn about some of the new features and enhancements in Visual Studio 2008 SP1, including...

Be sure to check out the Microsoft PSS VSTO 2005 Client TroubleShooter tool . This tool enables you to scan the client computer where you want to deploy your VSTO solutions to determine if all of the prerequites are installed, as well as providing information...