April 2008 - Posts
Misha blogs again, this time about how to install a VSTO 2008 add-in to all users on a machine. Deploying your VSTO 2008 Add-In to All Users (Part III)
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VBA code can easily be called from VSTO. Here are the basic steps. Create a document with VBA code in it. Declare a public function or subroutine in the VBA code behind the document. Figure out a trusted location to create a VSTO project from Create
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Slavishly copied from John Durant's blog, I hadn't seen these before so I thought I'd pass them one. They are two case studies showing how CME Group and Dell used Visual Studio 2008 and the new features of VSTO in their solutions. CME Group Link
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There's a nice intro video to the VSTO Power Tools we recently released on Channel 9. Hopefully when i get a little more time, I'll be able to blog a bit more about these tools. For now, check out the video intro: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=397787#39778
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One of the cool new features of VSTO 3.0 is better support for what I would term "Extending VBA with VSTO". Our strategy here and what we recommend to customers is that we aren't going to try to migrate all your VBA code to VSTO--this is a bit of an unsolvable
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During Kurt DelBene’s keynote at Collaborate 08 the OBA Sample Application Kit for PeopleSoft—a new addition to the small family of OBA Sample Application Kits—was announced This kit was designed for developers and architects to
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This is a common question with VSTO 3.0 add-ins. Office only allows VSTO add-ins to be registered under HKCU in the registry which means they can only be installed for the user that runs your add-in setup on their account, not available to all users
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Geoff Darst--an engineer on our team--sent this to me a while back and I think it would be good to pass it on. I still think in general people avoid using ApplicationClass because it makes your code look like the VBA and VB6 code everyone is familiar
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Kristopher Makey, an engineer on my team, blogs about how to add an "Update Now" button to get a VSTO add-in to force an update . Update: He has a second article which is more complete here . Unfortunately it's a bit of a hack for now, but if you really
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Something to check out if you haven't seen it yet. This was released earlier this year. http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/devmap The Microsoft Office Interactive Developer Map is a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application that helps developers
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Daniel Molina, a developer on my team, shared this code which is useful if you want to detect the Office color scheme (e.g. black, silver, blue) and try to match the backcolor of your ActionsPane or other UI you show to match that color. A couple of caveats:
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So, while running Excel 2007 with VSTO installed, you may have noticed that there are two design time adaptors registered, one for Excel 2003 and one for Excel 2007: I asked one of our engineers, Richard Cook, to give me a run down of why we do this.
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If you haven't checked this out yet, it is worth looking at. Nathan Carlson, a developer on my team, created a VSTO Outlook Add-in that can read your mail using voice synthesis and also responds to voice commands. You can download the source code here
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The VSTO team blog has moved to http://blogs.msdn.com/vsto , and the RSS feed is http://blogs.msdn.com/vsto/rss.xml . The team blog is an interesting source of insider information on VSTO, I'd encourage you to subscribe. Some cool recent posts over there:
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Andrew Whitechapel posted a great article explaining the multiple versions of the VSTO runtime. http://blogs.msdn.com/andreww/archive/2008/04/02/vsto-loader-and-runtime-components.aspx One anecdote that I find entertaining--the original VSTO runtime was
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Michael Dunn posted a cool VSTO add-in for Outlook that integrates Outlook and Communicator. All the code is there as well. The add-in puts the communicator window inside of Outlook in a task pane.
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I updated a very popular blog post I made several years ago with some little additions and corrections that I think make the process of creating a user defined function (e.g. a custom function to use in Excel formulas) easier to create in Visual Studio
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Jie Wang shared these photos with me of the VSTO book now translated into Chinese. Thanks to Jie Wang (in the photo) for his work on this book as well as Mei Liang who wrote a review for the book.
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