Office Development with Visual Studio : SP1

Video How Do I: Add Controls at Run Time in an Application-Level Project (Mary Lee)

VSTO Team — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 18:59:52 GMT

In Walkthrough: Adding Controls to a Worksheet at Run Time in an Application-Level Project, you can see to add host controls at run time in an application-level add-in by using Visual Studio 2008 SP1. This video is posted to the How Do I Videos - Visual Basic page, part of the Visual Basic Developer Center.

How Do I: Add Controls to a Worksheet at Run Time in an Application-Level Project?

Mary Lee, Programming Writer.

VSTO Runtime bootstrapper package failure causes deployed customization installation to fail (Aaron Cathcart)

VSTO Team — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 11:48:00 GMT

In an attempt to make this easier to read here are a few terms I will be using frequently in this article:

VSTOR = Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System (version 3.0 Runtime) (x86)
VSTORSP1 = Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System (version 3.0 Runtime) Service Pack 1(x86)
Bootstrapper = the clickonce bootstrapper that gets deployed with a VSTO customization when there are prerequisites checked (setup.exe)

Some of our customers have raised an issue with the bootstrapper failing after deploying their customizations onto a user’s machine that has previously had VSTOR & VSTORSP1 installed.

The problem occurs when an end user installs VSTOR followed by VSTORSP1 then subsequently uninstalls VSTOR from the Add/Remove Programs wizard. The uninstall removes the entire product including the service pack but fails to update the registry keys that our bootstrapper uses to detect if VSTOR is installed. If a user then installs a customization using the bootstrapper it will incorrectly detect that VSTOR is installed and proceed to install VSTORSP1, at which point it fails.

I recently responded to a customer on the VSTO forums ( http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vsto/thread/2dd02b04-cc89-47c3-8f76-462ecfbee65e ) regarding this issue where I approached it from an end-user perspective, providing them with a list of fixes for post-deployment use. The purpose of this article is to provide a solution that developers can utilize so that end-users machines do not require post-deployment modification.

This workaround will allow developers to bake the correct VSTOR detection logic into every customization they develop that utilizes the bootstrapper.

Here is what you need to do:

On the development machine locate the file %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bootstrapper\Packages\VSTOR30\product.xml
Replace the element
<RegistryCheck Property="VSTORuntimeInstalled" Key="HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VSTO Runtime Setup\v9.0.21022" Value="Install"/>
with
<MsiProductCheck Property="VSTORuntimeInstalled" Product="{8FB53850-246A-3507-8ADE-0060093FFEA6}"/>
Alter the element
<BypassIf Property="VSTORuntimeInstalled" Compare="ValueGreaterThanOrEqualTo" Value="1"/>
to be
<BypassIf Property="VSTORuntimeInstalled" Compare="ValueGreaterThanOrEqualTo" Value="3"/>

And that’s it! Now that you have made these changes to your product.xml, every VSTO customization you build and deploy with a bootstrapper will correctly detect if VSTOR is installed regardless of what state the end-users machine is in.

VSTO and the .NET Framework Client Profile (Christin Boyd)

VSTO Team — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 04:02:05 GMT

One of our loyal blog readers asked if "VSTO officially supports targeting the Client Profile? I did a quick check and it seems to be working fine but it is good if we explicitly mention whether it is supported." The answer is yes. Starting in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (SP1), you can develop 2007 Microsoft Office solutions with .NET Framework version 3.5 or .NET Framework Client Profile. The .NET Framework Client Profile is a subset of the full .NET Framework 3.5 that has a size of 25-30 MB. For more information about the .NET Framework Client Profile, see .NET Framework Client Profile.

You can read more about how to target the Client Profile in the localized documentation article "How to: Change the Target .NET Framework"

If you build a solution with the Client Profile, then please let us know by commenting on this page. Does the performance suite your needs? How was the experience?

-Christin Boyd, Program Manager

Channel 9: New Features for VS2008 Office Projects in SP1 (Beth Massi)

VSTO Team — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 23:17:00 GMT

I just posted an interview with Kris Makey on Channel9. Kris is a Developer on the Office Client team. Here he shows us a couple new features of Office projects in Visual Studio 2008 SP1. First he demonstrates a new error logging feature that will log any end-user install errors to the Event Log making it much easier to tell what went wrong. He also shows us how you can place Winforms controls directly on document surfaces.

For more information on Office Development with Visual Studio visit the developer portal at http://msdn.com/vsto.

New Features for Visual Studio 2008 Office Projects in SP1

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

How Do I: Add Smart Tags to Excel Workbooks? (Kathleen McGrath)

VSTO Team — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 01:35:00 GMT

With the release of Visual Studio 2008 SP1, you can now add smart tags to Excel by using an add-in. In this video, I show you how to add them to both a document-level customization and an add-in project.

How Do I: Add Smart Tags to Excel Workbooks?

This video is based on the topic: How to: Add Smart Tags to Excel Workbooks, where you can get the code and follow along step-by-step.

Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 released! Now what? (Christin Boyd)

VSTO Team — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 00:18:59 GMT

Yeah! Service Pack 1 is released to the web!

Now what do I do? I'd like to help you navigate the information we published about SP1. I strongly recommend that you read the VSTO section of the SP1 Readme here. You can read about all the great improvements to Visual Studio in the Knowledge Base article about all the bug fixes we put into the Service Pack. Hopefully your issues were addressed in this SP.

If you want to know how my team decided what to put into the Service Pack, you can read the archived blog entry from June titled "What's New in VS 2008 SP1 and how the VSTO team decided what to include in a Service Pack."

For an overview of What's New in Visual Studio Tools for Office with SP1, you can read the linked article in the documentation. The documentation is Localized, so you can read it in Japanese, German, or any of the other languages that our documentation supports!

What's New in Visual Studio Tools for Office

Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (SP1) contains updates and new features that affect Visual Studio Tools for Office. The SP1 changes are listed separately from the Visual Studio 2008 features to help you find the latest additions quickly. Visual Studio 2008 SP1 includes features that are designed to help you accomplish the following tasks:
Add Host Controls and Smart Tags to Add-in Projects

You can add smart tags and host controls, such as content controls in Word 2007 and list objects in Excel 2007, to documents in application-level add-in projects. These managed host controls behave like native Office objects, but with added functionality such as events and data-binding capabilities.
To get started, see Adding Controls to Office Documents at Run Time and Smart Tags Overview.
Deploy the Office Primary Interop Assemblies with Your Solution Installer

When you use ClickOnce to deploy solutions for the 2007 Microsoft Office system, the Microsoft Office 2007 Primary Interop Assemblies are automatically selected as prerequisites. The primary interop assemblies are copied to the same deployment folder as your solution installer.
To get started, see How to: Install Prerequisites on End User Computers to Run Office Solutions (2007 System).
Rapidly Deploy Your Solution with the .NET Framework Client Profile

You can now specify the .NET Framework Client Profile as the target Framework version. This smaller version of the .NET Framework decreases the size of your solution during installation by not including all of the Framework assemblies. You can use this with your solutions for the 2007 Microsoft Office system.
To get started, see Creating Office Solutions in Visual Studio.
Troubleshoot Installation with the Event Viewer

· When you install or uninstall Visual Studio Tools for Office solutions, the Visual Studio Tools for Office runtime logs error messages that you can view by using the event viewer in Windows. You can use these messages to help resolve installation and deployment problems.
To get started, see Event Logging (2007 System).

What's New in VS 2008 SP1 and how the VSTO team decided what to include in a Service Pack (Christin Boyd, Mary Lee)

VSTO Team — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 22:29:00 GMT

Updated August, 2008

I'd like to give you some insight into how we decide what goes into a Service Pack for Microsoft Visual Studio. I'm speaking specifically about how the VSTO team built SP1; most other groups within Visual Studio use the same process.

We take a few different approaches including:

Clearly defining the scope and purpose of the Service Pack
Prioritizing Critical Bugs in our bug database in a large meeting room with many stakeholders and passionate debates
Writing scenarios from the perspective of the user in the form of "I can develop a ..."
Daily triage of all bugs, including bugs that are entered by customers through Connect

In the last few months of product stabilization (which means the last few months before we shipped VS 2008), we make tough decisions to postpone some bugs to the Service Pack (SP). At some point around RTM, we schedule meetings to start prioritizing bugs for the SP.

The Visual Studio division is split into about a dozen Product Units, of which VSTO is a Product Unit. Twenty people from the VSTO unit met to prioritize bugs for the SP. We voiced opinions, quoted customers, demonstrated the bugs, and threw around cost estimates such as "Richard could fix it in three or four days" "No way, that is at least an 8 day work item and the workaround is straight forward!" Debates were often passionate because we are proud of our work, and care deeply about fixing any problems. We had three separate meetings over the course of a month to enable teams to refine their cost estimates and further research solutions. We prioritize on a couple of factors:

Severity: meaning impact to users judged by asking is there a workaround, does it leave the project in an unstable state, or in the worst case does something crash.
Priority: meaning does it impact a core scenario, do customers use this feature often, is it a regression from a previous release.
Cost: how long will it take to fix it and test the fix.
Dependencies: if it requires code changes in Office or the .NET Framework, we would need to negotiate with those teams and their Service Pack teams.

The second way we prioritize and document our Service Pack plans is to write scenarios. We hear feedback from you describing what you want to accomplish with our tools. So we take that feedback and write our feature descriptions using the first-person voice of the customer. We write both tasks and full end-to-end scenarios. If there is a bug that prevents the user from accomplishing the complete scenario, then that is a high priority bug fix for a Service Pack. For example, here are some of the scenarios that we addressed with Service Pack 1 to Visual Studio 2008:

I can add managed controls to a Word document by using an application-level add-in.(including Windows Forms controls and VSTO controls in the Microsoft.Office.Tools.Word namespace)
I can add managed controls to an Excel Workbook by using an application-level add-in.(including Windows Forms controls and VSTO controls in the Microsoft.Office.Tools.Excel namespace)
I can add a VSTO Smart Tag to a Word Document or Excel Workbook by using an application-level add-in.
The Office 2007 solutions that I compiled with VS 2008 before SP1, continue to function properly when the SP1 update to the VSTO 3.0 Runtime is installed.
I can use the Publish Wizard to successfully create a Click Once deployment for my Office 2007 solution.

By writing our designs in this format, we put ourselves in the place of the customer and create test cases appropriately. We also list the cost of each item in work-days and any risks or dependencies. Then we're able to make informed decisions about which scenarios and how many scenarios we can fix in a given number of work-months. After we've prioritized which features go into the SP, we then write more technical specs that define what is in scope, out of scope, assumptions, UI design diagrams, test specs, security threat models, and lists of dependencies on other teams and the locations of their code drops.

As of today, the VSTO team fixed 143 high severity bugs in the Office features of VS 2008. Five of the fixed bugs were submitted by customers using Connect. I don't have the total bug fix count for the entire division, but it is over a thousand. We are still a few weeks from releasing the Service Pack and we hope to squeeze in a few more critical bug fixes.

We focused on delivering two core scenarios enabling easier deployment and enabling adding Host Controls to application-level add-ins. In the final documentation that will release with SP1, there is a section describing what's new in SP1. Here's the text that you will see in the SP1 documentation after we ship:

What's New in Visual Studio Tools for Office

Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (SP1) contains updates and new features that affect Visual Studio Tools for Office. The SP1 changes are listed separately from the Visual Studio 2008 features to help you find the latest additions quickly. Visual Studio 2008 SP1 includes features that are designed to help you accomplish the following tasks:
Add Host Controls and Smart Tags to Add-in Projects

You can add smart tags and host controls, such as content controls in Word 2007 and list objects in Excel 2007, to documents in application-level add-in projects. These managed host controls behave like native Office objects, but with added functionality such as events and data-binding capabilities.
To get started, see Adding Controls to Office Documents at Run Time and Smart Tags Overview.
Deploy the Office Primary Interop Assemblies with Your Solution Installer

When you use ClickOnce to deploy solutions for the 2007 Microsoft Office system, the Microsoft Office 2007 Primary Interop Assemblies are automatically selected as prerequisites. The primary interop assemblies are copied to the same deployment folder as your solution installer.
To get started, see How to: Install Prerequisites on End User Computers to Run Office Solutions (2007 System).
Rapidly Deploy Your Solution with the .NET Framework Client Profile

You can now specify the .NET Framework Client Profile as the target Framework version. This smaller version of the .NET Framework decreases the size of your solution during installation by not including all of the Framework assemblies. You can use this with your solutions for the 2007 Microsoft Office system.
To get started, see Creating Office Solutions in Visual Studio.
Troubleshoot Installation with the Event Viewer

· When you install or uninstall Visual Studio Tools for Office solutions, the Visual Studio Tools for Office runtime logs error messages that you can view by using the event viewer in Windows. You can use these messages to help resolve installation and deployment problems.
To get started, see Event Logging (2007 System).

I hope this explanation gives you some insight into the people on my team who build the Office features in Visual Studio and the process we use to prioritize our work.

-Christin Boyd, Program Manager, Microsoft.

-Mary Lee, programming writer, Microsoft.