Mike Hernandez Blog : VSTO

VSTO Team at Tech Ed 2007 Orlando

MikeH — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 08:06:00 GMT

The VSTO Team is at Tech Ed!

I’m sure most of you are aware that Tech Ed is going on now, even as we speak, in Orlando, Florida. What you might not know, however, is that several members of the VSTO team are at the event. They are presenting breakout sessions and Chalk Talks; they’ll be at the Ask the Experts activity; and they’ll be at the product booth throughout the entire event.

So who is there?

Thomas “TQ” Quinn – Principal Architect

Paul Stubbs – Senior Program Manager

Christin Boyd – Customer Program Manager

Steve Fox – Customer Program Manager

McLean Schofield – Programmer Writer

Brian Goldfarb, Group Product Manager in the Developer Marketing Team, presented a great VSTO demo during Bob Muglia’s keynote speech on the first day of the event. You can see a video of that keynote in its entirety here. Brian comes out about an hour and 11-12 minutes into the session.

Be sure to drop by the VSTO product booth and ask for a copy of the new VSTO Fact Sheet. It’s loaded with cool information about VSTO, links to VSTO-related resources, and screen shots of the upcoming VSTO 3.0 in action.

A side note: I’m sure some of you who have been at previous Tech Eds are wondering, “Why aren’t you here, Mike?” The answer is that, sadly, this is the first Tech Ed I’ve missed in a long time. I was unable to attend this year’s Tech Ed because I’m scheduled to speak next week at the Dutch Dev Days 2007 event in Amsterdam, and then at the Irish VSTO User Group Tour the following week. But be of good cheer – I’ll be sure to raise a pint of Guinness on your behalf while I’m in Ireland! J

Until next time…

Announcing the Microsoft Office Interactive Developer Map

MikeH — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 07:43:00 GMT

The Microsoft Office Interactive Developer Map is a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application that helps developers visualize the different programs, servers, services, and tools that will help them build solutions. It allows them to drill down to each product and technology and learn about new features, objects, Web services, namespaces, and schemas required to extend Microsoft Office and build custom Office Business Applications (OBAs).

VSTO Screencast: Extend your VBA with .NET!

MikeH — Thu, 10 May 2007 09:57:00 GMT

There is a new VSTO screencast on the MSDN Channel 9 site.

Here's the link: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=306413

Here are the details:

Visual Studio "Orcas" makes it very easy for your existing VBA solutions to call Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) methods! By setting the "EnableVbaCallers" and "ReferenceAssemblyFromVbaProject" project properties to TRUE, VSTO automatically adds the necessary code spit and references to your VBA project. Then you're free to mix managed .NET code with VBA script! Preserve your investment in VBA and amaze your friends as you effortlessly call VSTO using VBA's IntelliSense.

Join Eric Schnepp, Principal Program Manager in the VSTO team in this screencast to see how it all works.

I hope you enjoy it!

Mike Hernandez

VSTO: My Favorite Feature Blog Series

MikeH — Tue, 01 May 2007 00:27:00 GMT

Visual Studio Tools for Office is the premiere development tool for building Office Business Applications. More features and RAD tools are added to VSTO as it evolves and some of these items are becoming fast favorites of the VSTO product team and third-party VSTO experts alike. Take a look at this blog series as it unfolds over the next six weeks and discover the favorite features and tools of team members such as Eric Carter, Paul Stubbs, John Durant, and Kathleen McGrath, in addition to third-party VSTO experts such as Ken Getz, Paul Ballard, and Tim Huckaby.

Blog Entry Schedule

Date	Blogger	Blog Address	Feature
02-May	Ken Getz Eric Carter	http://www.mcwtech.com/cs/blogs/keng http://blogs.msdn.com/eric_carter/default.aspx	Globals Class & Ribbon Support Outlook Form Regions
09-May	Kathleen McGrath	http://blogs.msdn.com/kathleen	Ribbon Designer
16-May	Paul Stubbs	http://blogs.msdn.com/pstubbs	Deployment
23-May	Paul Ballard	http://weblogs.asp.net/paulballard	Custom Task Panes
30-May	Eric Carter Tim Huckaby	http://blogs.msdn.com/eric_carter/default.aspx http://blogs.interknowlogy.com/timhuckaby/	Click Once PPT add-in support for Ribbon and Task Pane
06-Jun	John Durant	http://blogs.msdn.com/johnrdurant/	Workflow tools
13-Jun	Paul Stubbs	http://blogs.msdn.com/pstubbs	MOSS
20-Jun	Tim Huckaby Kathleen McGrath	http://blogs.interknowlogy.com/timhuckaby/ http://blogs.msdn.com/kathleen	Mining a SQL database with VSTO Word Content Controls
27-Jun	John Durant	http://blogs.msdn.com/johnrdurant/	VBA => .NET Interop
03-Jul	Paul Ballard	http://weblogs.asp.net/paulballard	MOSS 2007 Integration

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the Microsoft Office System is now available!

MikeH — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 11:32:00 GMT

I’m very pleased to announce the release of Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System (Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Second Edition, or VSTO 2005 SE for short), a fully-supported, free add-on to Visual Studio 2005 that empowers developers to build applications targeting the 2007 Microsoft Office system.

For further details about VSTO 2005 SE, please see the post on the VSTO Forum by KD Hallman, General Manager of the VSTO Team.

(Yes, I know we already announced this at Tech Ed Barcelona and Dev Connections Las Vegas earlier this month, but better late than never! <vbg> I’m still getting used to this whole blogging business and I just remembered that I hadn’t posted my announcement.)

Enjoy!

Mike Hernandez

Product Manager, VSTO