Office Development with Visual Studio : Kemp Brown

Microsoft Office Developer Show Episode 4 (Harry Miller)

VSTO Team — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 19:16:17 GMT

In this episode: a tip about saving and restoring the position of custom toolbars in Outlook 2007, and how to copy values from one worksheet and paste them in another. Plus, Mary finishes her Excel application and sends it to her boss in e-mail.

Duration: 4 minutes, 33 seconds

Related resources for more information:

Forum post: Saving toolbar positions in Outlook 2007

How to: Maintain Position Information for Custom Toolbars between Outlook Sessions

Forum post: Excel sheet CopySpecial having problem in xlPaste type

Range.PasteSpecial Method

Microsoft Office Developer Show Episode 3 (Harry Miller)

VSTO Team — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 18:01:22 GMT

In this episode: a tip about serializing data in a Word document so users can't see it, and why content controls disappear from documents if you add them at run time. Plus, Mary customizes the Ribbon in Excel so her boss Kemp doesn't need to use button controls on the worksheet itself.

Duration: 5 minutes, 29 seconds

Related resources for more information:

Serializing data and recreating content controls

Document variables property and code example

Caching data objects

How to cache data and code example

How to add content controls to documents and code example

AddPlainTextContentControl method and code example

Microsoft Office Developer Show Episode 2 (Harry Miller)

VSTO Team — Thu, 29 May 2008 05:14:00 GMT

In this episode: a tip about how to save a new copy of a Word document instead of saving over the original, and how to create a class in an Outlook project to access methods without hitting the object model security prompts. Plus, Mary creates a quick data UI in Excel for her boss Kemp.

Related resources for more information:

Save a new copy of a document instead of saving over the original

Create a class in an Outlook project to access methods without hitting the object model security prompts

More about accessing Outlook from John R. Durant's blog

Do you have an opinion about Visual Studio and .NET Framework developer Help content? (Kemp Brown)

VSTO Team — Thu, 22 May 2008 02:23:00 GMT

Our Help content architect, Kathleen McGrath, has created a short, anonymous survey (15 questions/10 mins.) to gather input on how and when the Visual Studio and .NET Framework developer Help content is used, how satisfied you are with it, and about areas that need improvement:

Link to the Visual Studio and .NET Framework Developer Documentation Survey

(Kathleen will also be taking this survey with her to TechEd in June.)

The focus of this survey is content improvement. We want to learn more about the types of applications you're creating, the tools/technologies you're using, and how we can improve our content and code examples to help you achieve your goals.

Thanks in advance for participating!

- Kemp Brown, programming writer

New Power Tools - Ribbon IDs Tool Window (Kemp Brown)

VSTO Team — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 02:57:00 GMT

The Visual Studio 2008 Tools for Office team just released a cool suite of productivity apps for VS Office development called the VSTO Power Tools. One of the tools included is the Ribbon IDs Tool Window, an add-in tool window for VS that lets you browse the MSO icons that come with Office. You can use these icons to spiff up your custom Ribbon controls. All you need to do is click an icon in the Ribbon IDs Tool Window to obtain its ID, and then plug the value into the control's OfficeImageID property.

I've recorded a short video that demonstrates the tool window and how to use it to customize some Ribbon controls:

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There are a couple of additional items not in the video that bear mentioning:

You can also use this tool with XML-based ribbons, even dragging-and-dropping the icon value into the XML.
You are not limited to using only MSO images in your controls, although that this is the purpose of this tool.

Here are links to the Help topics I mentioned at the end of the video:

Try it out and let us know what you think!

- Kemp Brown
Programming Writer for BizApps User Education