Office Development with Visual Studio : C#

TechEd Sessions on Office Development

VSTO Team — Fri, 08 May 2009 00:16:02 GMT

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
Mon 5/11 2:45 PM-4:00 PM | Blue Theater 1

OFC325 Building Custom Applications in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007
Ty Anderson, Damon Armstrong
Tue 5/12 2:45 PM-4:00 PM | Room 408A

DTL324 - Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Overview for the Business Application Developer
Jay Schmelzer
Tue 5/12 4:30 PM-5:45 PM | Room 515B

OFC324
Advanced Microsoft Office Word and Excel 2007 Development in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 with Visual Studio Tools for Office
Eric Carter
Thursday 5/14 1:00PM-2:15PM | Room 515A

Of course, there are a dozen other sessions that appeal to Office developers and SharePoint developers. These are the four that I highly recommend. Originally I was going to list the 3 not-to-be-missed sessions, but then I couldn’t drop any of these from my list, so we have 4 Must See Sessions!

If you’re not going to TechEd, then please click the links on these speakers’ names to read their blogs where the will eventually post some of their demo code. Expect the posts to happen the Monday after their sessions. In the case of Eric Carter, he would probably love it if you’d buy his book, Visual Studio Tools for Office 2007: VSTO for Excel, Word and Outlook. Or you could just download a zip file with all of the of code from the book here. That should keep you busy for a while. The explanations in the book really do add to the overall value. I should credit the co-author, Eric Lippert. Both men are brilliant and funny, and very modest. At the Holiday Party this year, Eric Carter got up to sing karaoke and astounded us all with a bouncy rendition of “Sesame Street.”

-Christin Boyd, Program Manager, Visual Studio

Test Automation Tips: “User Name” dialog after new install of Word (Christin Boyd, Bill Robertson)

VSTO Team — Wed, 06 May 2009 00:12:12 GMT

We have a team of developers who focus entirely on writing test automation programs for the purpose of covering the huge matrix of test cases that Visual Studio requires. We often configure new installs of Office and our automated tests need to deal with the special things that Office products do when you first run them after a new install. For example, when you first run Microsoft Word after a new install, it prompts you to enter your name and initials in a dialog that looks like this:

Our talented SDET’s (Software Development Engineer in Test) use the following function in their automated tests to suppress this dialog:

using System.IO;

using System.Diagnostics;

public static bool AddOffice12UserInfo()

            bool passed = false;

            string[] commands = new string[5];

            commands[0] = @"add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common /v UserData /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f";

            commands[1] = @"add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\Common\UserInfo /v Company /t REG_SZ /d Microsoft /f";

            commands[2] = @"add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\Common\UserInfo /v UserName /t REG_SZ /d TestRun /f";

            commands[3] = @"add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\Common\UserInfo /v UserInitials /t REG_SZ /d t /f";

            commands[4] = @"add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\General /v ShownOptIn /t REG_DWORD /d 00000001 /f";

            for (int i = 0; i < commands.Length; i++)

                bool temp = StartREG(commands[i]);

                if (!temp)

                    return false;

            passed = true;

            return passed;

public static bool StartREG(string arguments)

    bool passed = false;

    int exitcode = -100;

try

        string localpath = Path.Combine(System.Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("SYSTEMROOT"), "system32");

        System.Diagnostics.Process myProcess = new System.Diagnostics.Process();

        myProcess.EnableRaisingEvents = false;

        myProcess.StartInfo.FileName = Path.Combine(localpath, "reg.exe");

        myProcess.StartInfo.Arguments = arguments;

        myProcess.StartInfo.UseShellExecute = false;

        myProcess.Start();

        myProcess.WaitForExit();

        exitcode = myProcess.ExitCode;

        if (exitcode == 0)

            passed = true;

        else

            Debug.WriteLine("reg exit code is::" + myProcess.ExitCode.ToString());

    catch (Exception ex)

        Debug.Fail(ex.Message, ex.StackTrace);

    return passed;

Let me know if these Test Automation samples are useful and we will try to publish more of these.

-Christin Boyd, Program Manager, Visual Studio and Bill Robertson, Software Development Engineer in Test, Visual Studio

Deploying Office 2003 Solutions with Windows Installer (Mary Lee)

VSTO Team — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 02:08:05 GMT

You may want to develop Microsoft Office 2003 solutions with Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 for several reasons.

Your customers are using Microsoft Office 2003.
Your customers are using both Microsoft Office 2003 and the 2007 Microsoft Office system.
Your customers are using .NET Framework 2.0 and cannot migrate to .NET Framework 3.5.

Once you're done with development, you'll want to deploy your Microsoft Office 2003 solutions to your end users. This process involves the following steps:

Check for and install the following prerequisites: .NET FX 2.0, VSTO 2005 SE runtime, and the Microsoft Office primary interop assemblies. If your client computers already have the prerequisites, or you want to do this manually, you can skip this step.
Copy the customization assembly to the end user computer.
Grant full trust to the customization assembly.
For application-level add-ins only, create a set of registry keys so that the Office application knows to load the add-in.

Due to customer demand, I've created five deployment samples that demonstrate these steps. Step 1 is demonstrated in two ways: you can select your prerequisites through the Prerequisites Dialog Box to be installed with the Setup.exe bootstrapper; alternatively, you can configure launch conditions in the Setup project to only install the customization if the prerequisites already exist.

Prerequisites Dialog Box:

Launch Conditions editor:

You can use the Setup project to complete step 2 by copying the customization assembly and for document-level projects, the document or workbook, to the designated installation location. This is done by adding the project output with the File System Editor. The default installation location in these Setup projects is %PROGRAMFILES%\MyCompany\<Name of Setup Project>.

File System Editor:

Full trust is granted by using the SetSecurity project for step 3. This code uses a custom action in the Setup project to create a code access security policy that creates a solution code group for your Office solution, and an assembly code group for the customization assembly.

Custom Actions Editor:

Step 4 only applies to application-level add-ins: when you use the Excel 2003 add-in or Word 2003 add-in project templates, there is a Setup project automatically added to your Office solution that already creates the registry keys documented in Registry Entries for Application-Level Add-Ins.

Registry Editor:

The process of preparing the development computer for deployment and configuring the Setup project is written out step-by-step in the following two whitepapers:

Deploying Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the Office System SE Solutions Using Windows Installer (Part 1 of 2)

Deploying Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the Office System SE Solutions Using Windows Installer: Walkthroughs (Part 2 of 2)

Now, it's time to experiment on your own. Download the sample code and the completed installers from the MSDN Code Gallery: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/VSTO2005SEMSI

Happy deployment!

Mary Lee, Programming Writer.

DevConnections Conference: VSTO Session Demos (Christin Boyd)

VSTO Team — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 02:23:00 GMT

Hi Folks! If you're not one of the 4,000 professionals attending DevConnections in Las Vegas, then never fear! You can see my demos and learn about my session "Office Development with Visual Studio 2008" from this blog entry!

VS 2008 lets you target Office 2003 or Office 2007. We recommend that you only install one version of Office on your development computer. If you find yourself developing for both versions often, then I suggest creating a dual-boot computer with Office 2003 on one boot, and Office 2007 on the other. If you develop mostly for one version, and occasionally target the other, then a Virtual PC image would be fine, if you have enough RAM. I have 2Gig on my laptop, which is not enough for a VPC running Visual Studio. My desktop computer back in Redmond has 4G, which is plenty.

FAQ: If you choose to ignore my recommendation and have 2 versions of Office on your development computer, then you may have some weirdness when you try to Debug and the debugger loads the wrong versions of some Office DLLs. If you try to open an Office 2003 project and you keep getting the Upgrade Wizard, and you don't want to, then uncheck the "Always Upgrade" option in the Tools\Options dialog as shown in this funny video and in this photo below:

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 one document
Demo code: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386198.aspx
Try clicking on the outermost top edge of the Ribbon Designer and then setting the property "Start from Scratch" = True. Then add another Tab to the Ribbon Designer and set the ControlId = TabInsert and ControlType = Office and OfficeId = TabInsert as seen below:

VBA interop with VB .NET

Check out this really nice VBA Interop demo by my Scottish colleague, The Moth!

Databinding

This part of my demo failed on Tuesday because my security ticket had expired, which made my Windows Authentication login to the database fail. The problem was that I last received an Active Directory authentication on Friday afternoon when I logged in to my domain in Redmond, Washington. Then I flew to Vegas and worked on my laptop without logging in to the corporate domain. By Tuesday afternoon my kerberos ticket had expired, which made my Windows Integrated Security database logins fail. A failure like that in front of an audience of 100 people is an EPIC FAIL! Oops.

In conclusion, I will in the future use SQL Authentication instead of Windows Authentication for demonstrations when I am on-the-road for conferences.

Demo code: Databound Word Content Controls http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb157875.aspx

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 video by The Moth

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 you can click on the Tag "Deployment" in this blog to see lots and lots of posts on the topic.

Deployment Best Practices

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

Conclusion

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

How Do I: Deploy Document-Level Office 2007 Solutions with Windows Installer? (Mary Lee)

VSTO Team — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 19:26:00 GMT

In Deploying an Office solution using Windows Installer, you read how to deploy document-level Office 2007 solutions with Windows Installer. As a follow up, you can now see how to add a Setup project to your VSTO solution and add a custom action to update custom document properties. This example uses Excel 2007, but you can apply these principles to any document-level customization.

Deploying Excel Document-level Customizations with Windows Installer

This video is based on the whitepaper: Deploying a Visual Studio Tools for the Office System 3.0 Solution for the 2007 Microsoft Office System Using Windows Installer (Part 2 of 2), where you can get the code and follow along step-by-step.

Mary Lee, Programming Writer.

How Do I: Deploy Application-Level Office 2007 Solutions with Windows Installer? (Mary Lee)

VSTO Team — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 19:21:33 GMT

In Deploying an Office solution using Windows Installer, you read how to deploy application-level Office 2007 solutions with Windows Installer. As a follow up, you can now see how to add a Setup project to your VSTO solution and create registry keys. This example uses Excel 2007, but you can apply these principles to any application-level add-in.

Deploying Excel Application-level Add-ins with Windows Installer

This video is based on the whitepaper: Deploying a Visual Studio Tools for the Office System 3.0 Solution for the 2007 Microsoft Office System Using Windows Installer (Part 1 of 2), where you can get the code and follow along step-by-step.

Mary Lee, Programming Writer.

Peek at Service Pack 1 (Christin Boyd)

VSTO Team — Mon, 12 May 2008 08:42:10 GMT

Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 is not finished yet, but we do have a beta version of the documentation ready for you to read! You can learn about some of the features that you'll see later this year when we release SP1.

I recommend starting with reading about a totally new feature that we put into SP1 that allows you to extend Word documents and Excel Workbooks at runtime from an Application-Level Add-in. Here is the link to the Beta of the documentation:

http://vs2008sp1docs.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ms334311.aspx

You'll be able to create objects and respond to events including:

Host Controls
ListObjects
Smart Tags
Word Content Controls
and Events such as DocumentBeforeSave

Only some of the new deployment features have been documented so far. You can read about one of the new deployment features in the Event Logging (2007 System) page in the SP1 documentation here:

http://vs2008sp1docs.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ms331997.aspx

Starting in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (SP1), you can use the event viewer in Windows to see error messages that are captured by the Visual Studio Tools for Office runtime when you install or uninstall Visual Studio Tools for Office solutions. You can use these messages from the event logger to resolve installation and deployment problems.

The Beta version of the Service Pack is only getting distributed to about a thousand beta testers who have great reputations for submitting clear feedback and bug reports. I hope this little peek at the documentation will get you excited about what's coming later this summer in Service Pack 1.

-Christin Boyd, Program Manager

Databinding best practices for Excel (Christin Boyd)

VSTO Team — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 07:14:00 GMT

I read a question on the forum about databinding in an Excel solution. The developer was asking about Excel 2003, but the answer I wrote will work for both Excel 2003 and Excel 2007. Here's the question: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3122341&SiteID=1&mode=1

As a best practice you can create one dataset in ThisWorkbook designer and then programmatically reference it from your code in other sheets.

Here’s how:

Add new Data Source of Data Base type, by specifying a database connection and selecting tables, views and columns.

Next open ThisWorkbook.vb in the designer. It will look like it's a big gray box with two sentences that say "This is the workbook designer...." Now from the Toolbox, under the Data section, select a DataSet and drag it onto the design surface. When you drop it, you will get a dialog that asks if you want a typed or untyped dataset. Select Typed. It should prepopulate an edit box with <your namespace>.MyDataSet. Click OK. On the design surface you should now see an icon next to MyDataSet1. In C# you will want to set the modifier to Internal or Public on the data set in the property browser.

Next open the code behind ThisWorkbook.vb. Inside the ThisWorkbook_Startup procedure, you should fill your MyDataSet1 instance with code like this:

VB Sample

  DimpatientAdapter As New MyDataSetTableAdapters.PatientsTableAdapter
  patientAdapter.Fill(Me.MyDataSet1.Patients)

  Dim rxAdapter As New MyDataSetTableAdapters.PrescriptionsTableAdapter
  rxAdapter.Fill(Me.MyDataSet1.Prescriptions)

C# sample

  MyDataSetTableAdapters.PatientsTableAdapter ta =
    new MyDataSetTableAdapters.PatientsTableAdapter();
  ta.Fill(myDataSet1.Patients);

Next you can open Sheet1 designer. Now select "Add New Data Source" from the data menu and this time choose to add an "Object" not a database! You will get a dialog that shows the hierarchy and this time DO NOT select the table adapter! Open the name of your project, then the namespace, then you should see MyDataSet. Select it then click OK. This action will create an Object in your Data Sources window.

Now you can select from the Data Sources Window, you should see something called MyDataSet. This object can be used to create a databinding in your sheets. So you can drag from this universal object into any one of your sheets. Grab it and drag it onto Excel Sheet1 and it created an empty table. In order to finish setting it up, select the table and in the property grid click on the arrow next to DataMember property and select the data table that you want to be bound to the table. Try it, and see how it creates a new BindingSource object for each sheet, but you still have just the one DataSet instance.

In each Sheet, you need to add the following line of code for Each table:

Me.PatientsDataTableBindingSource.DataSource = Globals.ThisWorkbook.MyDataSet1

Please let me know through comments on this blog if this explanation works for you. Thank you!

Deploying an Office solution using Windows Installer (Mary Lee)

VSTO Team — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 03:39:00 GMT

Visual Studio 2008 offers a ClickOnce deployment experience for solutions developed for the 2007 Microsoft Office system. However, if you want to deploy additional files, add extra registry keys, or use SMS, you may still be interested in creating a Windows Installer package.

Here are the very basic steps to configure your setup project:

1. Add the release build or publish output of your solution. Then manually add the application and deployment manifests (.dll.manifest and .vsto files).

2. For application-level projects, create the registry keys so that the Microsoft Office application can find your add-in. For more information, see Registry Entries for Application-Level Add-Ins. For the add-in name, use a syntax similar to [CompanyName].[AddinName].

3. For document-level projects, update custom document properties which point to the location of the deployment manifest. If you leave the document in the same relative location compared to the customization assembly, you don't need to update the _AssemblyLocation property. But if you want to move the document to a user's desktop or Documents folders, you'll have to update the _AssemblyLocation property. For more information, see Custom Document Properties Overview.

You must still use ClickOnce security to trust your solution. You can deploy your .msi at this point, but you'll see a trust prompt asking whether the solution should be installed or not. To avoid prompting your end users, sign your manifests with a known and trusted certificate or pre-trust the solution by creating an inclusion list entry. For more information, see Security in Office Solutions (2007 System).

Bonus: there is sample code to help you complete the steps of deploying additional files, updating the document's _AssemblyLocation, and creating an inclusion list entry. Visit http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/VSTO3MSI in the MSDN Code Gallery to download the sample code.

For all the details, read the deployment whitepapers at Deploying a Visual Studio Tools for the Office System 3.0 Solution for the 2007 Microsoft Office System Using Windows Installer (Part 1 of 2) and Deploying a Visual Studio Tools for the Office System 3.0 Solution for the 2007 Microsoft Office System Using Windows Installer (Part 2 of 2).

If you run into trouble implementing this, visit the VSTO MSDN forum at http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/showforum.aspx?forumid=16&siteid=1 to search for answers or ask your questions.

Mary Lee, programming writer.