Office Developer Conference: Developing and Deploying Office Solutions with VS 2008 (Christin Boyd)

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

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

• http://Blogs.msdn.com/VSTO
• http://MSDN.Microsoft.com/Office
• Samples in the MSDN Library http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/z63ctsh2.aspx
• Videos and Whitepapers in MSDN http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb871648.aspx

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