Office Development with Visual Studio : VB

BUG: “Old format or invalid type library” error when automating Excel (Christin Boyd)

VSTO Team — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 01:54:33 GMT

A customer recently reported this bug when running their Shared Addin for Excel on French Windows.

Error: 0x80028018 (-2147647512)
Description: Old Format or Invalid Type Library

His solution worked great on English Windows, but gave errors in any other language. This is a known problem in Excel and there are a few workarounds that work depending on the way you’re writing your Excel Addin. Let me take you through the problem, variations on the problem, and different solutions depending on which Visual Studio project template you choose to start your Addin.

The bug was originally documented in a KB 320369 article, which gives detailed repro steps, explanation, and two workarounds with sample code. So why am I writing a blog post if the KB article covers everything? Three reasons.

Because we’re fixing the problem in CLR 4 and I want to encourage you to use one of the recommended workarounds in your current solutions so that you’re ready when your users upgrade to .NET Framework 4.
Also, there are parts of the KB article that are a bit confusing, so I’ll try to add some color commentary to help explain what’s causing the problem.
And third, these problems do not occur if you use VSTO 2005 SE, VSTO 3.0 (which ships with Visual Studio 2008), or Visual Studio 2010. I’ll explain why and how later.

The KB article describes the problem:

Error: 0x80028018 (-2147647512)
Description: Old Format or Invalid Type Library

You receive this error calling an Excel method when the following conditions are true:

The method requires an LCID (locale identifier).

You run an English version of Excel. However, the regional settings for the computer are configured for a non-English language.

If the client computer runs the English version of Excel and the locale for the current user is configured for a language other than English, Excel will try to locate the language pack for the configured language. If the language pack is not found, the error is reported.

The quote from the KB article is accurate, but can be confusing. It is very difficult to determine if the Excel method you want to call requires LCID or not. The Primary Interop Assembly (PIA) does not indicate whether or not the LCID is needed, however VBA does not hide the need for LCID. Part of the reason why Excel hasn’t changed its methods is to maintain back compatibility with all the VBA code in the universe.

Fixed in VSTO

VSTO implemented a fix in VSTO 2005 Second Edition (SE). You can read more about this fix in Eric Carter’s blog post. The fix is also in all subsequent versions of Visual Studio 2008 and will be in Visual Studio 2010. You know you are using “VSTO” when you create a new Project in Visual Studio and select an Excel <version number> Workbook, Excel <version number> Template or Excel <version number> Addin. The fix was not implemented in the Shared Addin template in any version of Visual Studio. If you create a WinForms, WPF, Web or console application that calls Excel, then you will see this bug on non-English Windows.

Workarounds

If you are using the Shared Addin template, a WinForm, WPF, Web or Console application with any version of Visual Studio, then you should use the KB 320369 article to solve the problem.

The workaround is to write explicit calls to set the thread’s culture before calling into Excel. You can then reset the culture back to what it was before after you are finished calling Excel.

Install the Multilingual User Interface Pack for your version of Office.

Execute the Excel method or property by using InvokeMember so that you can specify the CultureInfo for the call. For example, the following code illustrates how you can invoke the Workbooks object Add method with "en-US" as the CultureInfo:

Dim oApp As New Excel.Application()
oApp.Visible = True
oApp.UserControl = True
Dim oBooks As Object = oApp.Workbooks
Dim ci As System.Globalization.CultureInfo = New System.Globalization.CultureInfo("en-US")
oBooks.GetType().InvokeMember("Add", Reflection.BindingFlags.InvokeMethod, Nothing, oBooks, Nothing, ci)

Or, instead of the above bullet and code sample, set the CultureInfo prior to calling the Excel method, and then you can reset it after your Excel call:

Dim oApp As New Excel.Application()
oApp.Visible = True
oApp.UserControl = True
Dim oldCI As System.Globalization.CultureInfo = _
    System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture
System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = _
    New System.Globalization.CultureInfo("en-US")
oApp.Workbooks.Add()
System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = oldCI

The .NET Framework 4 will solve this whole culture problem. Excel is not going to change its culture sensitivity because of the need to support backwards compatibility. Starting with CLR 4.0, when managed code calls into a COM component and an LCID is required, then the CLR will pass LCID = 1033. Note that this is how VBA passes LCIDs. This means that Visual Studio 2010 project templates for Excel Addins can stop wrapping all Excel projects with LCID proxy. In the future, when you use VS 2010 and .NET 4 to write your Excel automation programs from a Shared Addin, console, Winforms, WPF, or Web application, you won’t need to wrap your calls either.

-Christin Boyd, Program Manager & Misha Shneerson, Senior Developer

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

New "How Do I" Video on Creating Smart Tags in Word (Beth Massi)

VSTO Team — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Our very own Mary Lee has got a new video up on the Dev Center on programming smart tags in with custom recognizers in Word using Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1. This is a video version of the How To topic in the MSDN library.

Watch or download the video here.

Thanks Mary!

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

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: 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.

Create an Excel Shortcut Menu That Writes Selected Values to a Text File (Harry Miller)

VSTO Team — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 23:14:59 GMT

It doesn't take much code to add a command to a shortcut menu in Excel, but the menu objects have strange names so it's not intuitive, to me at least. The trickiest part is just sorting out how it's supposed to work, because it seems like it should be different from adding buttons to toolbars, but it really looks like that's what you're doing.

You can watch the video and make me happy, or you can just jump to the code example that's all given a little lower down. Thanks to McLean Schofield, programmer/writer and 3-star forum answer person, for this code example!

Duration: 3 minutes, 50 seconds.

Public Class ThisAddIn

Private WithEvents writeToText As Office.CommandBarButton
Private selectedCells As Excel.Range

Private Sub ThisAddIn_Startup(ByVal sender _
As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Startup

DefineShortcutMenu()
End Sub

Private Sub DefineShortcutMenu()

        Dim menuItem As Office.MsoControlType = Office.MsoControlType.msoControlButton
        writeToText = Application.CommandBars("Cell").Controls.Add(Type:=menuItem, _
            Before:=1, Temporary:=True)

        writeToText.Style = Office.MsoButtonStyle.msoButtonCaption
        writeToText.Caption = "Write to a Text File"
        writeToText.Tag = "0"
    End Sub

    Private Sub Application_SheetBeforeRightClick(ByVal Sh _
        As Object, ByVal Target As Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.Range, _
        ByRef Cancel As Boolean) Handles Application.SheetBeforeRightClick

selectedCells = Target
End Sub

Private Sub writeToText_Click(ByVal Ctrl As Office.CommandBarButton, _
ByRef CancelDefault As Boolean) Handles writeToText.Click

        Try
            Dim currentDateTime As System.DateTime = _
                System.DateTime.Now
            Dim dateStamp As String = _
                currentDateTime.ToString("dMMMMyyyy_hh.mm.ss")

            Dim fileName As String = System.Environment.GetFolderPath( _
                Environment.SpecialFolder.MyDocuments) & "\\" & _
                dateStamp & ".txt"
            Dim sw As System.IO.StreamWriter = New System.IO.StreamWriter(fileName)

            For Each cell As Excel.Range In selectedCells.Cells
                If cell.Value2 IsNot Nothing Then
                    sw.WriteLine(cell.Value2.ToString())
                End If
            Next
            sw.Close()
        Catch ex As Exception
            System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox.Show(ex.Message)
        End Try

End Sub

End Class

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

Calling Into A VSTO Add-in From a COM Smart Tag (McLean Schofield)

VSTO Team — Wed, 07 May 2008 23:38:31 GMT

My last post explained some of the differences between VSTO smart tags (that is, smart tags that you implement in a document-level solution for Word or Excel by using VSTO) and COM smart tags (that is, smart tags that you create by implementing COM interfaces provided by the smart tag SDK). If you are using VSTO to create application-level add-ins for Word or Excel, or add-ins for other applications that support smart tags, such as PowerPoint and Outlook, then you must use the smart tag SDK if you want to also create smart tags for these applications. The general recommendation is to create your smart tags in a separate assembly (or unmanaged DLL, if you wish).

At the end of the post, I mentioned that if you go this route, you can still call into the VSTO add-in from the COM smart tag. Any technology that enables you to communicate between application domains, such as .NET remoting or Windows Communication Foundation, should work, with varying degrees of complexity. However, the easiest way to do use built-in APIs provided by VSTO and Office to expose an object in your add-in to the smart tag, and then to call into this object from the smart tag.

Exposing an Object in Your Add-in to the Smart Tag

Starting in VSTO 2005 SE, add-ins have been able to expose functionality to other Office solutions by overriding the RequestComAddInAutomationService method. When your add-in is loaded, the VSTO runtime calls this method to give you an opportunity to return an object that want other Office solutions to use. For example, if your add-in can display a custom task pane that enables end users to navigate data, you can expose this feature to other solutions by defining a class with a method that displays the task pane, and then returning an instance of this class in your override of RequestComAddInAutomationService.

Side-bar: COM add-ins that implement the IDTExtensibility2 interface directly can do the same thing. In the implementation of the OnConnection method, the add-in receives an object that represents the application's view of the add-in as the AddInInst parameter. Although this parameter is typed as an object, for Office add-ins, this object is really a COMAddIn. Inside the OnConnection method, the add-in can set the COMAddIn.Object property to an object it wants to expose. When you override RequestComAddInAutomationService in a VSTO add-in, fundamentally the same thing is going on under the covers, but this is all abstracted away from view.

The following code example demonstrates a simple implementation of RequestComAddInAutomationService. This assumes that my VSTO add-in defines a class called AddInUtilities, which I want other solutions to be able to use.

Private utilities As AddInUtilities

    Protected Overrides Function RequestComAddInAutomationService() As Object
        If utilities Is Nothing Then
            utilities = New AddInUtilities()
        End If
        Return utilities
    End Function

It is important to understand that you can't return just any object. Your object must be in an instance of a class that is visible to COM, and that exposes the IDispatch interface. One way to meet these requirements is to first define a COM-visible interface that exposes IDispatch. You should define this interface in its own assembly (for example, a class library project), so that the VSTO add-in and the smart tag assembly can both reference the same interface declaration. The following example demonstrates a simple IAddInUtilities interface that defines a method called DisplayData.

    <System.Runtime.InteropServices.ComVisibleAttribute(True)> _
    <System.Runtime.InteropServices.InterfaceType( _
        ComInterfaceType.InterfaceIsIDispatch)> _
    Public Interface IAddInUtilities
        Sub DisplayData()
    End Interface

Then, in your VSTO add-in that references the assembly that declares IAddInUtilities, you can define a COM-visible class that implements the IAddInUtilities interface. The actual code in the DisplayData implementation isn't important for this discussion, so I'll leave it out for clarity.

    <System.Runtime.InteropServices.ComVisibleAttribute(True)> _
    <System.Runtime.InteropServices.ClassInterface( _
        System.Runtime.InteropServices.ClassInterfaceType.None)> _
    Public Class AddInUtilities
        Implements IAddInUtilities

Public Sub DisplayData() Implements IAddInUtilities.DisplayData

' Do stuff here.

End Sub
End Class

For more specific details about the requirements for the object you return in RequestComAddInAutomationService, see Calling Code in Application-Level Add-ins from Other Office Solutions. For a walkthrough that demonstrates how to expose an object in a VSTO add-in and then call into the object from VBA code in an Excel workbook, see Walkthrough: Calling Code in an Application-Level Add-in from VBA.

Accessing the Object From a COM Smart Tag

When you create a COM smart tag, you must implement the ISmartTagRecognizer and ISmartTagAction interfaces. Of these, ISmartTagAction defines a specific action that the end user can select when they click your smart tag. This is a likely place to want to call into your VSTO add-in. The question is, how do you do this?

When the user clicks the icon to run an action, your implementation of the ISmartTagAction.InvokeVerb method contains the code that you want to run. The Target parameter of this method is an application-specific object that represents the context in which the smart tag appears. For example, in Excel, the Target parameter is a Range that identifies the cell that the smart tag was attached to.

In your implementation of ISmartTagAction.InvokeVerb, you can cast the Target parameter to the appropriate object in the object model of the application. From there, you can easily traverse the application's object model to get the Application object, then the COMAddIn object for your VSTO add-in, and then finally the Object property that contains the object you exposed in the add-in.

The following example demonstrates a simple implementation of InvokeVerb. If the recognized term is sale, then this method calls a helper method named CallAddIn, and passes the Target parameter to this helper method.

    Public Sub InvokeVerb(ByVal VerbID As Integer, _
        ByVal AppplicationName As String, _
        ByVal Target As Object, ByVal Properties As ISmartTagProperties, _
        ByVal Text As String, ByVal Xml As String) _
        Implements ISmartTagAction.InvokeVerb

        If String.Compare("sale", Text, True) = 0 Then
            Select Case VerbID
                Case 1
                    CallAddIn(Target)
            End Select
        End If
    End Sub

Here is the definition of the CallAddIn helper method.

Private Sub CallAddIn(ByVal Target As Object)
Dim ExcelApp As Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.Application = Nothing

        If Target IsNot Nothing Then
            Dim SmartTagRange As Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.Range = _
                TryCast(Target, Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.Range)

            If SmartTagRange IsNot Nothing Then
                ExcelApp = SmartTagRange.Application
            End If
        End If

        If ExcelApp IsNot Nothing Then
            Dim AddIn As Microsoft.Office.Core.COMAddIn = ExcelApp.COMAddIns( _
                "ExcelSmartTagInteropDemo")
            Dim Utilities As AddInInterfaces.IAddInUtilities = _
                TryCast(AddIn.Object, AddInInterfaces.IAddInUtilities)

            If Utilities IsNot Nothing Then
                Utilities.DisplayData()
            End If
        End If
    End Sub

This method tries to cast the Target parameter to an Excel Range. If successful, the method gets the Excel Application object, and then uses the COMAddIns property to get the COMAddIn that represents a loaded VSTO add-in with the name ExcelSmartTagInteropDemo. Finally, the method gets the Object property, tries to cast it to an IAddInUtilities, and then calls the DisplayData method implemented by the add-in. This of course assumes that the smart tag assembly references the assembly in which the IAddInUtilities interface is defined.

At run time, when the end user types "sale" in an Excel range and clicks the smart tag action, then the smart tag calls into the DisplayData method implemented in the VSTO add-in. This all happens by way of COM interop via several built-in APIs in VSTO and Office.

--------------------------------------------------

McLean Schofield, programming writer

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.