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In order to provide a more integrated experience for folks building custom solutions on the Office platform, we’ve merged the content from the VSTO Developer Center into the Office Developer Center . You’ll still find great learning content there including: Getting Started with Office Development with...

A customer on the VSTO forums recently noticed that the steps we blogged about for sharing a single Ribbon customization between multiple projects in Visual Studio 2008 no longer works in Visual Studio 2010. When following the instructions in the blog post, you get an error when you try to open the Ribbon...

We have helped many developers in troubleshooting VSTO add-in load failures. Hamed has written a very nice blog post explaining the basic steps to troubleshoot VSTO add-in load failures. Even if you have not faced this issue yet, I recommend reading the post because it contains basic information about...

Managed Office add-ins traditionally have been able to run in the targeted application (the version of the application whose PIAs the add-in references) and in later versions of the application. Therefore, if you need to create a single VSTO add-in that can be run in multiple versions of an application...

Recently I helped two customers that were trying to solve this problem. They wanted to get notifications whenever Excel sorted or filtered data. This is not as easy as it sounds because Excel does not raise any events for sorting and filtering. I found two possible solutions, one of which requires much...

I was chatting with some of my friends about Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4 and they asked me why should they move their application to .Net Framework 4, I am answering the question here for everybody to benefit. Frankly speaking there is no definitive answer; it is like there is no single pill...

The first thing that you notice after opening your existing projects in Visual Studio 2010 is the very familiar Visual Studio Conversion wizard. Internally we call it Project Migration wizard. Personally I love this wizard because of its simplicity, my converted projects are only few clicks away. In...

Nathan Halstead is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Team. He is responsible for various aspects of Visual Studio extensibility, and is an avid ice hockey enthusiast. On occasion, he’s been known to guest author technical articles on various Microsoft blogs and forums. My only contribution to this...

The “Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Applications.Deployment.FrameworkVersionMismatchException” is thrown due to the specific implementation of how VSTO 2010 runtime loads the appropriate CLR to install a VSTO customization. This exception is thrown when both .NET Framework 3.5 (CLR 2.0) and .NET Framework...

If you have written code that shows and hides context menu items in Outlook 2007, that code might not behave well in Outlook 2010. That is exactly what happened to this individual who recently posted to the VSTO forum. The command bar object model (which most folks use to muck around with menus) has...

Good news! Project 2010 supports custom task panes! Bad News! Getting one to appear in a Project 2010 is not so obvious. Good News! It’s a lot easier than I make it sound. In this post, I’ll show you how to add a custom task pane to Project 2010 by using a Project 2010 or Project 2007 project template...

There have been a couple of blog posts about delay loading VSTO addins, and with Dev10 being released soon, it’s a good time to expand on the subject a little bit. This has been covered before, and I’ll avoid spending too much time here on topics that have already been covered. For an overview of...

Visual Studio can help migrate your Outlook solutions from .NET Framework 3.5 to the .NET Framework 4. However, you still have to do a few things manually to make it all work.  Beth Massi converts an Outlook Solution that targets the .NET Framework 3.5 to an Outlook Solution that targets the .NET...

You can add a custom group to the Message tab of an Outlook mail item.  For example, here is a custom group named "MyCoolGroup" that I added to the message tab of a new message: Outlook lets you open a message in the following two modes: Compose (you are drafting a new message). Read ...

Office 2010 brings in many new features to the Ribbon and Backstage extensibility. In order to take advantage of those changes in VSTO addins, you will need to update your ribbon XML projects to use the new Office 2010 schema. First, you will need to see if the schema is installed. To do this, look...

The Visual Studio team is designing the runtime components for Office 2010 so that your Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 .NET addins, document solutions and spreadsheet solutions will run on 64-bit Office 2010.  These runtime components will ship with Office 2010, so your...

A customer recently reported this bug when running their Shared Addin for Excel on French Windows.  Error: 0x80028018 (-2147647512) Description: Old Format or Invalid Type Library His solution worked great on English Windows, but gave errors in any other language.  This is a known problem in...

If you haven’t seen it yet, we’ve got a new article from Robert Green (MVP) up on the VSTO Dev Center . In this article, learn how you can use Visual Studio to build application-level add-ins that automate common Microsoft Office tasks. It’s a good introduction to Office development with Visual Studio...

So you want to open a task pane by using a button on the Ribbon. You also want a form region that appears in an e-mail item to detect the state of a control on a custom task pane so that you can add or remove an option that appears in a Ribbon menu right? Ok, I completely made this scenario up. But at...

I’m at TechEd in LA, but it seems I could get just as much excitement just watching the Twittersphere today and watching #tela09 tags!  And my feet are killing me.  So be glad you’re sitting at your computer instead of walking around Los Angeles!  Let me give you some highlights for Office...

If you’re going to TechEd in Los Angeles next week, then don’t miss these four sessions: DTL03-INT Meet the Microsoft Visual Studio Team Christin Boyd, Eric Carter , Paul Yuknewicz, Jay Schmelzer, Dustin Campbell , Jonathan Aneja, Luke Hoban , Igor Zinkovsky, Faisal Nasir, Harry Pierson , Lisa Feigenbaum...

Recently, a forum poster asked us how he could add a submenu item to a built-in menu item in Outlook.  Note that these are not controls that appear on the Ribbon of an Outlook item, but rather the menus that drop down from the top of the Outlook Explorer such as the View menu and the Tools menu...

Last month I posted this article that described how to prevent your add-in from creating duplicate menu items in Word.  If you have been experimenting with customization contexts, you might have several menu items that appear when you right click a document. The article that I posted shows how to...

This week Microsoft is hosting an internal even called Tech Ready 8 in Seattle. Microsoft technical field reps and product teams come together to talk about all of the great products we're building. I presented a session on Building Office Development Applications with Visual Studio along with a couple...