Fabulous Adventures In Coding : VSTO

VSTO Book News

Eric Lippert — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 18:10:42 GMT

I am pleased to announce that my co-author Eric Carter has made significant updates to our VSTO book. (Though I notice with chagrin that one of the changes is that the title is much shorter than it ought to be.) It is not yet available in bookstores but will be soon.

The new parts of the book (which I did no work on at all, this one is Carter's baby!) cover the 3.0 version of VSTO in great detail; if you're looking for the definitive work on the subject, this is it.

See Eric Carter's blog for more details to come.

Yet More Book News

Eric Lippert — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 17:42:47 GMT

It's a bookish day apparently. I am pleased to pass on news of the availability of the book Eric Carter and I wrote about VSTO, now in Chinese. Here is Jie Wang holding a copy of the original C# book and the VSTO开发指南 Visual Basic book:

Many thanks to Jie Wang, Mei Liang, and everyone at Addison Wesley and 中国电子工业出版社 (China Publishing House of Electronics Industry) who helped make this possible.

Recent Book News, Part Two

Eric Lippert — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 21:32:35 GMT

Two additional quick notes about books:

I am also pleased to announce the availability of the C# 3.0 Cookbook, for which I was again lucky enough to be one of the technical reviewers. Many thanks to the authors for giving the shout-out to this blog in their front matter.

"Real" cookbooks tend to provide specific solutions to specific culinary problems; they'll tell you how to make banana bread, for instance. What I particularly like about my favourite cookbook, The Joy of Cooking, is that it does not stop there; rather, each section of recipes has an introduction that treats the subject in general. Rather than merely a dozen muffin recipes, there is an exposition on the general nature of muffins that gives some context and guidelines should you want to branch out beyond the canned recipes.

Similarly, "cookbook" style programming books tend to de-emphasize having a solid theoretical understanding of the language and frameworks, and instead present canned solutions to specific problems. Since those solutions almost certainly do not solve your exact problem, the developer must then hammer on the canned solution until it conforms to the problem at hand. That way lies cargo cult programming! Fortunately, the C# 3.0 Cookbook does a good job of not just providing a lot of good solutions to common problems, but also provides some background on the general classes of problems that it treats. This is not at all a C# 3.0 language tutorial, but it is very handy to have around when you're like "Hmm, how does one get the audit info out of a file?"

And finally, I am tickled that it has happened again. I have just heard that my last book will be translated into Chinese, of all things. Look for VSTO开发指南 coming to a Chinese bookstore some time in 2008, from 中国电子工业出版社 (China Publishing House of Electronics Industry).

Visual Studio Tools For Office: Using Visual Basic 2005 with Excel, Work, Outlook and InfoPath

Eric Lippert — Mon, 01 May 2006 19:47:00 GMT

Eric Carter and I are excited to announce that the Visual Basic edition of our book about Visual Studio Tools for Office is now available. I'd like to give a big thank-you to everyone who put their time, energy and enthusiasm behind this project, particularly my co-author (who, as always, did most of the heavy lifting.)

Visual Basic and Office programmability have gone together for a long time now and it was very important to us that we build a product that worked well for Office VBA programmers who want to move into the rich .NET world. It was therefore equally important that our book cover the particular needs of Visual Basic programmers. Sorting out whether we would have one book cover both C# and Visual Basic, or two books, and which one to do first was an agonizing process, but ultimately I think we made the right choices, and I'm thrilled with the result.

My only regret is that we couldn't make the title longer. I wanted it to be "Teach Yourself How To Build Professional Real-World Enterprise Solutions With Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2005 Tools For Microsoft Office System 2003 Using Microsoft Visual Basic 2006 With Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft InfoPath In Twenty-One Days In A Nutshell". Apparently that would have involved making the cover larger or infringing on a trademark or something, and it just wasn't feasible.

See Eric's recent blog post for more details about the book and where to download the code samples.

Book Signing at the PDC

Eric Lippert — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 18:25:00 GMT

It's a week until PDC! Very exciting. Unfortunately I'm not going this year but my coauthor and erstwhile lead Eric Carter will be there, along with Misha Shneerson and Andrew Whitechapel. He'll be talking about VSTO 2.0 (the about-to-be-released product) and you can also see a sneak preview of early VSTO 3.0 work running against Office 12. All the VSTO session details are on Eric's blog.

Eric will also be signing copies of our book. We haven't even seen copies yet! The ink will probably still be wet at the PDC.

And of course, Anders will be talking about the new C# 3.0 features coming up, which is good, because then I'll be able to blog about them while we're working on them.

Excitement, adventure, really wild stuff. I'll see if I can get the PDC gig next time. This blogging stuff is nice, but it's even better to be able to meet real customers face-to-face.

A Face Made For Email, Part Two

Eric Lippert — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 16:45:00 GMT

One year ago this week I was the Channel Nine guinea pig -- I'm still not sure why, but for some reason The Scobelizer and his cohort chose me to be the first guy interviewed for their project. (Probably because I'm mostly harmless.)

Channel Nine has succeeded tremendously, and I'm very pleased to have been a part of it at its birth. Recently Charles and Robert tracked me down and cornered me in a room with a really big XBOX screen to talk about Visual Studio Tools For Office and how we use .NET code access security.

If you've got 53 minutes to kill and you want to hear me ramble on about what I love to talk about most, check it out.

VSTO Web Cast On Tuesday

Eric Lippert — Tue, 27 Jul 2004 00:31:00 GMT

I've just now learned that my colleagues Andrew Jewsbury and Mohit Gupta will be talking about the recent beta release of our product -- Visual Studio Tools For Office -- July 27th in a web cast. Mohit and Andrew are responsible for much of the design and implementation of key portions of VSTO, so this should be interesting.

The web cast will take place from 1:00PM to 2:30PM Pacific Daylight Time. If you're interested, you can register for the web cast here.

UPDATE: Today's webcast the first of a series. Information on the six-part series of VSTO web casts can be found here.

Plumbing the Depths of .NET For Office

Eric Lippert — Fri, 09 Apr 2004 18:46:00 GMT

My lead Eric Carter has started blogging about the work we're doing on VSTO2. I'm excited that he's taken the plunge into blogging about this stuff for two reasons.

First, no one has a broader or deeper technical understanding of the plumbing underlying the programming model that we're designing for Office than Eric. (Which explains why the last time he took a vacation we decorated his office with plumbing supplies.)

Second, since he's doing it, that takes the onus of blogging about all this cool stuff off me so that I can continue to blog about hopelessly 20th century technologies.

(Speaking of which -- more is coming on SimpleScript soon, I promise. We're crazy busy getting the bugs out for Whidbey Beta 1, and as we start to get into actual semantics, the code is getting harder to write.)

VSTO 2.0, coming soon to an IT department near you

Eric Lippert — Tue, 02 Mar 2004 02:16:00 GMT

I know I've been talking a lot about the COM script engines -- how hopelessly twentieth-century! -- for the last few months. Coworkers who don't work with me directly every day are often surprised to learn that I haven't been on the script team for about two years now. I've been awfully busy over the last two years, and finally I can start talking about it. I've been working on the design and implementation of the plumbing underlying Microsoft Visual Studio Tools For The Microsoft Office System, version 2.0. That's rather a long title, so we usually refer to it as VSTO2 around here.

I'm going to be writing articles and comments for our new VSTO2 blog, which is just getting started at http://weblogs.asp.net/vsto2 -- I'll be sure to include links from this feed as well.

Also, if you guys are interested in VSTO2, or just want to hang out, I'll be giving talks on VSTO2 and the security implications of customized documents in the .NET world at VSLive in San Francisco and Toronto. I'll try to follow up with blog entries for those of you who, tragically, can't make it.

If you come to the talk, just remember: I am a professional software developer, not a professional public speaker. I'll try to avoid mumbling and babbling, but no guarantees.