Paul Stubbs

One annoying feature of XP is the Language Bar. This is the little toolbar that opens at the bottom of your screen and has no apparent purpose ( Microsoft Windows XP - What is the Language bar? ). Since it takes up valuable space on the Taskbar I want...

Today Chris Johnson and I are releasing a new tool to help you setup a SharePoint 2010 developer machine. In order to make this process as easy as possible we have created a series of PowerShell scripts that automate the entire process of building a fully...

  I thought it would be interesting on Christmas eve to compare the two models of distributing presents (content/services). I have put together a short list of features for each model. Santa (Server/Cloud) has a global approach to delivering presents...

Smart Tags are VSTO’s newest feature. They have been added to the product since Beta 1 has shipped. VSTO 2005 does for Smart Tags what it did for Action Pane , makes it easy and understandable for a .net programmer. Smart Tags in Office have been around...

I finished my first XNA application tonight at 1 minute before midnight on the launch day. This is an application that I wrote before using MDX 2.0 and Winforms (See the old article for the features) . I was able to convert the entire app in about...

One of my favorite features in the latest version of VSTO is ClickOnce Deployment. ClickOnce deployment makes securely deploying my Office add-in and document level solutions easy. VSTO deployment supports, Local , HTTP , UNC , CD / DVD and USB locations...

Creating SmartTags for Word and Excel using VSTO 2005 has become incredibly simple. I will show you how to create a SmartTag that interacts with an ActionsPane in less than 10 lines of code, including adding the ActionsPane. One of the hardest things...

The Windows Phone 7 platform contains great out of the box integration with SharePoint under the Office Hub. But what if you want to create your own custom applications on the phone that leverage SharePoint 2010 data and services? In this blog post I...

One question that I frequently get is how to call managed code from VBA. In general it is not recommended to mix VBA with managed code mainly due to the non-deterministic eventing model. In other words if VBA and managed code are listening for the same...

My wife has wanted to get an MP3 player for a while and I have been looking for the right one. I have a couple of ( ViewSonic and Hitachi )PocketPC's that I use and have been thinking about why not just use the PPC to play the music. The problem is that...

The RTM version of the SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 VHD files are now available for download. This includes Windows Server 2008 R2, SharePoint 2010, Office 2010, Visual Studio 2010, SQL Server 2008 R2, Exchange 2010 and more. See the download site...

Backup is not something as a home user that you think about everyday. I sure didn’t, until I had hard drive trouble. Then you start mentally listing all of the important documents and photos that you are about to lose. After I resigned to the fact...

Welcome to the New Year and welcome to my new blog. I am a Program Manager for Microsoft on the Visual Studio team. Our team is responsible for Office programmability. Our first product is Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System or just VSTO...

Today during Steve Ballmer’s keynote speech he announced VSTO for Outlook. Now in addition to Word and Excel, you can create Outlook add-ins using VSTO 2005 for Office 2003. VSTO will create managed add-ins for Outlook that will appear to Outlook as a...

Now that the XBOX 360 controller works on windows I thought it would be fun to hook it up to a windows forms application using Visual C# Express and Managed DirectX (MDX). So here is the scenario; you’re at your desk entering the latest budget numbers...

Learn how to use VSTS to create automated tests for VSTO Office applications....

[Updated: 1/30/2011 All Links] Office and SharePoint hands on labs The best way to get started learning about Office and SharePoint is to use the Channel 9 training kits. The training kits contain and number of videos and hands on labs. In order to complete...

Now you have created your XNA game but how do you package it so the world can download and install it? You will see how to build a windows setup (.msi) for your XNA game. You will use Visual Studio 2005 Pro (or above) to create a setup project that will...

So this morning I watched the PDC live from my desk in Redmond. This was great to be able to see all of the presentations without leaving my office (except for a bathroom break). It seems like 3 hrs is a long presentation. They had so much information...

This is my first Day at Microsoft....

Whitepapers Deploying Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Solutions Using Windows Installer (Part 1 of 2) http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa537173(office.11).aspx Deploying Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Solutions Using Windows...

Today at PDC05 they announced a new product that I have been working on for the last 2 years. So it is exciting for me to be able to finally share with you all what I have been working on. Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA) is a .NET-based...

VSTO 2005 enables developers to create Windows form Action Panes in Word and Excel with only 1 line of code. I will show you how to extend this technique to create an Action Pane using HTML. Why would you want to use HTML for a client side application...

In my blog yesterday I showed How to create a Word Watermark using VSTO 2005 . This was relatively easy to do using VB .Net. Today I will show you the same code using VSTO 2005 and C# (for those of you who like abuse). I have tried to make the code exactly...

Groove is an excellent Office application for team collaboration. You can also take advantage of the Groove platform from other applications like your VSTO add-ins. Let's take a look at how we can integrate Groove into Outlook using VSTO to create powerful...