Office Development with Visual Studio : SharePoint

Sign up for Office 2010 Technical Preview

VSTO Team — Tue, 12 May 2009 20:36:36 GMT

I’m at TechEd in LA, but it seems I could get just as much excitement just watching the Twittersphere today and watching #tela09 tags! And my feet are killing me. So be glad you’re sitting at your computer instead of walking around Los Angeles! Let me give you some highlights for Office developers:

Watch the Keynotes which include Office 2010 demos. Also some interviews on Office and SharePoint on the same TechEd site.

Office 2010 The Movie: Countdown to Awesome is the new site where you can watch a slick video and more importantly, click the Sign up for the Microsoft Office 2010 Technology Preview. When you click the link they show you the “fine print” which I will now print in large font:

By registering you are signing up to be considered for the Technical Preview Program, you will be waitlisted for consideration to be invited into the Technical Preview Program. We will notify invitees in early to mid July.

“What does that mean?” you ask. Well, it means that Microsoft wants to collect a wide variety of customer-types and ensure that our TechPreview covers all the different types of customers. For example, the sign-up form asks if you will test the Tech Preview at Home or Work. Be honest in your answer because we truly want to get perspectives from all types of Office users. Similarly the survey asks the size of your company and if you read Japanese. There is no trick to get invited.

If you don’t get invited, then don’t fret. We’ll give you some useful information on this blog and other Office blogs to help you prepare your business for the future. For now, I encourage you to build great solutions for Office using all of the resources at Microsoft including Visual Studio, VBA, Open XML SDK, code samples, Forum support, Code Gallery, and the Office Developer Center.

Sincerely, Christin Boyd, Program Manager

Developing for Office and SharePoint Server 2010 (Christin Boyd)

VSTO Team — Fri, 01 May 2009 23:08:42 GMT

I get a lot of questions about the future.

When will Office and SharePoint release? First half of 2010.
Is VSTO part of Microsoft’s long term strategy? Yes! The Office tools shipped in VS 2008 and will ship in VS 2010 with lots of cool new improvements. We strongly encourage and support .NET development on the Office and SharePoint platforms.
Will there be better Team Development tools for Office and SharePoint developers? Yes! Future blog posts will tell you more.
Are there any pricing changes? See below note on SharePoint Designer.
Can I get Office 2010 Beta or SharePoint Server 2010 Beta? Yes, eventually. A few thousand enterprises, small businesses, developers, ISVs, Partners, schools and families have been invited to join an early private “technical preview” beta, and the rest of the world will get to test a later public beta. No dates have been announced. Read the Computer World article on the Office Beta.
Should I sanitize my keyboard to prevent the H1N1 flu? Yes, but don’t put it in the dishwasher like my internship roommate did after a cola spill. It was hilarious, and half the keys still worked!

In the coming months you will see a few more blog posts about the future and plenty of blog posts about developing today with Visual Studio 2008. For now, I’d like to review all of the official posts that Microsoft has released about developing SharePoint Server 2010 solutions:

Press Release on SharePoint Server 2010

SharePoint Designer is now FREE

Soma’s blog post “SharePoint tools support in Visual Studio”

Official Visual Studio 2010 home page

PDF of the Official Visual Studio 2010 Product Overview

Channel9 Interview with the Lead Program Manager designing the Office and SharePoint tools in VS 2010

If I’ve forgotten any of the official Microsoft announcements in this post, then please leave a comment with a link. Thanks!

-Christin Boyd, Program Manager

Deploying Documents to a SharePoint Document Library (Mary Lee)

VSTO Team — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 02:56:00 GMT

When you are done developing your customized Microsoft Excel 2007 or Microsoft Word 2007 document-level project in Visual Studio 2008, you may want to publish it to a SharePoint document library for others to use from the SharePoint site, or they can copy the file from the site to their desktop to use locally. In either case, the customization assembly cannot be stored in the SharePoint document library, so you have to configure the workbook to store the assembly on a file share.

In Solution Explorer, right-click the Excel document-level project, and then click Publish. You'll see the Publish Wizard appear.

In the first page of the Publish Wizard, type the folder name where you want Visual Studio to copy the files, known as the publish location. In this case, it's a subfolder of the project folder.

In the second page of the Publish Wizard, type the folder name where the installation files will be located. In this example, the installation files are located on a configure the workbook to look for the assembly on a file share, known as the install location.

Note: You could have set the publish location to this file share in step 1 if you have access rights to the file share. Setting the install location separate from the publish location allows you to publish the files locally and then hand the files over to an IT administrator to upload the files to a file share.

The third and last page of the Publish Wizard is a summary of the publish options.

Copy the publish folder from step 1 to the file share, and upload the Excel workbook file to a SharePoint document library.

The final step is to trust the location of the SharePoint document library to the Trusted Location in Excel. Copy the URL of the SharePoint document library and remove the last Forms/Allitems.aspx text from the URL. For example, if your SharePoint document library is http://sharepoint/sites/writers/SampleDocLibrary/Forms/AllItems.aspx, the location to add to Excel is http://sharepoint/sites/writers/SampleDocLibrary.

1. Open Excel.

2. Click the Microsoft Office button.

3. Click Excel Options.

4. Click Trust Center.

5. Click Trust Center Settings.

6. Click Trusted Locations.

7. Check Allow Trusted Locations on my network.

8. Click Add new location.

9. In the Microsoft Office Trusted Location dialog box, in the Path textbox, type or paste the URL to the SharePoint document library. In this example, it's http://sharepoint/sites/writers/SampleDocLibrary.

10. Click OK to close the Microsoft Office Trusted Location dialog box.

11. Click OK to close the Trust Center dialog box.

12. Click OK to close the Excel Options dialog box.

Finally, open the Excel workbook file from the SharePoint document library. This starts the installation process for the Excel solution. Depending on the security settings, you may see the Microsoft Office Customization Installer dialog box prompting you to install the Excel solution.

This is the blog version of the following topic in the MSDN Library: How to: Deploy a Document-Level Office Solution to a SharePoint Server (2007 System). You can also see the video demonstration at Video How to: Deploy a Document-Level Office Solution to a SharePoint Server (2007 System).

Happy deployment!

Mary Lee, Programming Writer.