Misha Shneerson

If you are writing a VSTO customization - make sure you aware of this performance tip courtesy of Steve Peters - developer on the VSTO team. This tip allows to prevent VSTO runtime from reflecting on your entry point assembly. We see considerable startup...

Excel 2010 has a new feature called Slicers and a bunch of new methods and objects associated with slicers (I actually am not an expert on Slicers themselves and still need to understand what they are for and how they operate but this leads me to my next...

About a month ago I wrote a post on compiling the COM shim for 64-bit where I was hoping to have a version of COM Shim Wizards working with Visual Studio 2010. Today I am announcing the coming out of COM Shim Wizards for VS 2010 … I am calling it "coming...

When migrating VSTO solutions targeting .NET 3.5 to .NET 4.0 people are noticing some design changes. Our documentation on migration puts it pretty straightforward about this and does not explain the underlying reasoning for these changes: "If the...

It’s been quite a while since the last update to COM Shim Wizards has taken place. Among the things that have happened since are the new versions of Visual Studio (i.e. Visual Studio 2010) and Office (Office 2010). Both products are close to go out so...

The plan of record for this post is to collect refererences to NoPIA related posts by other folks whose opinion I cherish. I wish the list would update automatically when somebody has something smart to say about this stuff but not sure the technology...

Some users have reported that when using Visual Studio 2010 and referencing an Interop Assembly with "Embed Interop Types" set to TRUE they would get the error literally saying that the type cannot be embedded. Then the error would advise to use an interface...

What one should do on a plane back from the PDC? Of course! Write a new blog post! So, since I still have some topics to cover on the whole NOPIA shabang - here we go. CLR’s 4.0 support for Type Equivalence allows you to define your own copy of an interface...

Today I got a word that the video recordings I’ve made with Amanda Silver on the topics of Type Embedding and Type Equivalence did get published. My face is clearly should have been shaded out – but Amanda looks fantastic! Anyway, may be you will find...

Events implementation in the Interop Assemblies does have its shortcomings. I enumerated the issues in “ COM Interop: Handling events has side effects ” post. The quick recap is that Interop Assemblies eventing support does create “ghost RCWs” that get...

In my PDC session I did talk a lot about Type Embedding support in the compilers and that we call it NOPIA feature. The compiler changes have been implemented by Sam Ng and he is back to blogging. So I will keep an eye on what he has to say and so should...

I just finished my PDC session at Los Angeles where we introduced Type Embedding support in the compilers and Type Equivalence support in the CLR. Some people I talked to after the session were very enthusiastic about the whole thing and I did get comments...

From time to time Eric Carter shares with me some issues customers run into and wonders whether we can do something about it. The one I am going to talk about is quite interesting issue on its own AND I will talk about a solution we propose to this problem...

Advances in .NET Type System – sound like this is a PDC session one must come to. Here is the talks abstract: Under the Hood: Advances in the .NET Type System Enhancements to the type system in the next version of .NET Framework allow for loose type-coupling...

Having to rely on the correct version of PIAs to be deployed for implementing Office add-ins has become the inevitable reality for many Office devs. This reality is quite gruesome, I must add. Andrew Whitechapel describes a technique allowing single...

UPDATE March 11, 2010: Office 2010 does support deploying managed add-ins to HKLM which makes the below article a little bit outdated nowdays. There is also an optional download for Office 2007 containing the same fix. Check this article out for more...

Today I have a guest writer on my blog - Eric Faller. Eric shows the correct way to render Office icons returned by GetImageMso API. I got involved into this by replying to this post in our forums but the explanation just would not fit into a regular...

UPDATE March 11, 2010: Office 2010 does support deploying managed add-ins to HKLM which makes the below article a little bit outdated nowdays. There is also an optional download for Office 2007 containing the same fix. Check this article out for more...

UPDATE March 11, 2010: Office 2010 does support deploying managed add-ins to HKLM which makes the below article a little bit outdated nowdays. There is also an optional download for Office 2007 containing the same fix. Check this article out for more...

I have promised on several occasions that I will make a post on my blog as soon as an update to VSTO 2005 SE runtime becomes available. Unfortunately when this finally happened I was on vacation and could not immediately post this. My appologies for such...

We have recently released an update for VSTO 2005 SE design time support on Vista. The KB article is available here and does not explicitly say what exactly was broken or what fix has been made – it simply states the symptoms. On a Windows Vista-based...

The original deployment paper targeted deployment aspects of customizations built using VSTO 2005 release but since VSTO 2005 SE came out many people wondered what are the changes in the deployment, specifically the questions where around deploying the...

Omar had a problem: he was using VS 2005 SP1 on Vista to build his Windows Installer setup package for VSTO Outlook Add-In. When he tried to install the package - it was always failing with code 2869. He contacted me with "what is the deal?", I tracked...

Randy Byrne from Outlook has modified Outlook 2007 sample to use VSTO 2005 SE. RibbonX sample and Rules, Prepare Me, and Travel Agency

VSTO 2005 Second Edition Beta (aka VSTO2005SE) - this is a new free product that complements VSTO 2005. See this announcement from KD Hallman if you want to know general details about the product and the roadmap. I am here to discuss technical details...