Last Monday I presented session CLI202:  Developing and Deploying Smart Clients for Office at the Office Developer Conference in San Jose.  This blog post is a mini-version of the slides and demos from my session.  The session was not recorded.

Slide 1:  Office Development In VS 2008

  • You can develop either Office 2003 or Office 2007 solutions with VS 2008
  • Project Migration Wizard

FileNewProject

Slide 2: Excel And Ribbon Demo

  • Excel and Word templates let you program to the document surface
  • Word Content Controls, Bookmarks
  • Excel cells, Named Ranges, and Charts
  • Your custom Ribbon tabs can scope to just a document, or to the entire Office application
  • Demo code:  http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386198.aspx

Slide 3: Databinding

  • Drag n Drop
  • Complex data sources
  • Services (demo Amazon Web Service)
  • UI elements bind to a DataSet
    • Excel Ranges
    • Word Content Controls, bookmarks
    • Outlook Form Region controls
    • WinForm and WPF controls in a Task Pane
  • Demo code:  Databound Word Content Controls http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb157875.aspx

 

Slide 4:  Developing Outlook Add-Ins

  • Multiple Document Interface
  • Inspector Windows
  • Folders and Forms
  • Developer UI Elements
    • Ribbon and Menus
    • Custom Task Panes
    • Outlook Form Regions
  • Outlook Task Pane Demo code: I used a variation on this code http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb772082.aspx
  • Outlook Form Region Demo code:  not online yet, stay tuned to this blog!

Slide 5:  Deploying Office Solutions

  • Office Security is crucial
  • Office 2003 deployment is different from 2007
  • Office 2003 deployment model in VS 2008 is the same as it was in VSTO 2005
  • Office 2007 solution deployment is completely new technology in VS 2008
    • Leverages ClickOnce Cache
    • ClickOnce Automatic Update and Rollback
    • Prerequisites included in Setup
      (runtime and .NET Framework)
  • Demo steps:  http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb608592.aspx
  • Lots of session questions were about deployment and I will try to address those questions in subsequent blog posts here.

Slide 6: Best Practices

  • Only install one version of Office on your development computer
  • If you must develop or maintain solutions for both Office 2003 and Office 2007 then:
    • Ask your boss for a second computer :-)
    • Dual-boot
    • Use Virtual PC
  • Test your deployment on another computer that does NOT have Visual Studio installed
    • I use a test matrix of Virtual PC images on an external hard drive

Slide 7: Resources

I hope this information is useful as a reference for those who attended my session and for those of you who were unable to attend.   

-Christin Boyd, Program Manager