Misha Shneerson

This article by John Howard is priceless. Windows XP SP2 configures the firewall settings so that remote desktop is unacessible. My wife installed a fresh OS today and wanted to TS (which is a slang from Remote Desktop) from home but instead she had to...

Finally! It took an eternity to get this thing published, but now you can go to MSDN and download COM shim wizard that work with Visual Studio 2005. Original COM shim wizard only worked with Visual Studio 2003 and so many people have requested an upgrade...

Andrew Whitechapel was blogging about IRibbonExtensibility and how it can be used in AddIns to customize a ribbon in Office 12. I am not sure how many people have noticed this but VSTO v3 June CTP document customizations can also customize ribbons and...

I am breaking the silence to get the word out (to those loyal souls that still aggregate my blog) about 2 articles on VSTO deployment. First article is an in depth overview of VSTO deployment models and proposed solutions. The second one is a complete...

When you add non-terms into the SmartTag.Terms collection do you expect those terms to be recognized? If you do this is a false expectation. The simplest code to add a SmartTag to a Word document looks like this: private void ThisDocument_Startup(...

This post is prompted by a comment left yesterday on my blog. The comment was quite big in size. It went something like this - "my assembly has an ActionsPane and can not be loaded, here is the error message I am getting .... ". This brief introduction...

At the PDC we have announced support for managed Add-ins across most Office applications. Superficially it is not real news considering today we already have "Shared add-in" project. This project type is there since Visual Studio .NET and this thing is...

I am back from PDC and I can finally post to my blog! I was not able to do it from LA because 2 weeks before PDC I accidentally ran over my laptop with my van. No surprises here - the laptop is quite useless now. So in LA I had access to computers only...

PDC is just in a week and I will be there. I will present during the preconference with Eric Carter and Andrew Whitechapel . The reason three of us are doing this session is because it is 6 hours long! Since we all work directly on the VSTO code base...

Fabulous world of VSTO security still puzzles me after living in it for the past 3 years. Isn't it especially remarkable since I almost memorized the code that builds the security policies for VSTO? So, here goes my little rant to Peter aka the mastermind...

Eric Lippert could not pass on the opporunity to mess with the guts of C# v3. Which is good for Eric, not so good for VSTO team. Eric is an exceptional developer and he is one of the main reasons we take pride in the VSTO code base. He is tireless advocate...

Adding programmable task pane aka ActionsPane with VSTO is a piece of cake. All you really need to do is just add controls to the ActionsPane object using the familiar WinForms paradigm. Here is how you would show a button on the task pane in Word. ...

I took some time off from work for a family vacation. We spent our relaxation week on Vancouver Island in Canada. Here is more info since already couple of people have asked. The place we stayed at is called Beach Acres in Parksville, BC. We rented an...

Until recently people had "tough" choice to make - in your Outlook either run NewsGator or Outlook COM Add-ins with VSTO support. Both of these did not work together. This is because NewsGator did not support .NET Fx 2.0 which is required by VSTO. ...

Both Word and Excel OMs have APIs that allow closing documents programmatically. I suppose there are some scenarios when people would like to call ThisWorkbook.Close() from within their document customizations. This has some interesting effects when such...

One quick tip today. Since VSTO Beta2 we have added SmartTags support for document level customizations. How to create those is covered by Paul Stubbs here and in a video tutorial here . However what is not obvious is that one can dynamically change the...

When writing VSTO projects the developers are asked to write their startup code in an innocuous event handler e.g. ThisDocumet_Startup. VSTO project does a good job of making you believe that this event handler is where the game begins. However, the class...

That would be me - Misha Shneerson. I am a developer in VSTO team. My career has been evolving around Office Programmability since I joined Microsoft almost 5 years ago right before Microsoft Office XP Developer has shipped. Then came one of the re-orgs...