Office Development with Visual Studio : VSTO Power Tools

Showcasing the VSTO Power Tools… (Mary Lee)

VSTO Team — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 01:34:00 GMT

The latest .NET Rocks! TV video includes an interview with Beth Massi where she shows how to use the VSTO Power Tools! Also, she introduces some other minor features that you may have heard of: Open XML SDK and LINQ.

Check out Beth’s summary of the video and her demo at her blog: dnrTV: Showing off the Open XML SDK and LINQ.

Mary Lee, Programming Writer.

New How Do I Video on VSTO Power Tools (Beth Massi)

VSTO Team — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 22:43:53 GMT

They just released a new video on the VSTO Portal and Office Dev Center that I thought I would particularly call out because it works with one of the VSTO Power Tools that the team released in February. In this video Ty Anderson shows how to find an ImageID for Office Ribbon icons using the RibbonID VSTO Power Tool. You can download the VSTO Power Tools here. This video shows how to:

Open the RibbonID tool window in Visual Studio
Use the tool to browse for available images
Search for images
Assign an image from the RibbonID tool window as the image for a RibbonButton control

Watch the video here.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

Diagnosing/Troubleshooting Office Add-ins with AddInSpy (Beth Massi)

VSTO Team — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 00:22:37 GMT

If you missed the announcement on the VSTO Developer Portal, the team released a tool called AddInSpy that helps diagnosing problems with Office Add-ins. Andrew Whitechapel talks about it on his blog here.

Also check out and download the VSTO Power Tools which Andrew, myself, and the team has blogged about before. This download is packed with tools that make your life much easier when developing Office solutions. So if you don't have them already, what are you waiting for? Download AddInSpy and the Power Tools now!

Also stay up to date with announcement, videos, downloads, etc from the team by visiting the VSTO Developer Portal.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

Adding the Office Primary Interop Assemblies as a Prerequisite in your ClickOnce installer (Mary Lee)

VSTO Team — Fri, 09 May 2008 00:21:00 GMT

When you use ClickOnce in Visual Studio 2008 to deploy your Office solution, you can include prerequisites such as the .NET Framework 3.5, the Visual Studio Tools for Office system 3.0 Runtime, and Windows Installer 3.1. However, the primary interop assemblies (PIAs) for the 2007 Microsoft Office system are not automatically listed in the Prerequisites dialog box.

Fortunately, you can add the PIAs to the Prerequisites dialog box. The following procedure adds the 2007 Microsoft Office Primary Interop Assemblies to the Prerequisites Dialog Box. This procedure may look lengthy, but you only have to do it once.

1. Download the OfficeVSTO2005SEWindowsInstallerV3.msi sample, which is part of the deployment whitepaper at Deploying Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Second Edition Solutions Using Windows Installer (Part 1 of 2).

2. Install OfficeVSTO2005SEWindowsInstallerV3.msi.

3. Copy the contents of %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office SE Resources\VSTO2005SE Windows Installer Sample Version 3\packages to %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bootstrapper\Packages

4. Compile the component checker. This step checks if the computer has the correct version of Office installed to match the PIAs that are being installed.

a) Open a Visual Studio command prompt

b) Change directories to %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office SE Resources\VSTO2005SE Windows Installer Sample Version 3\projects\Checks

c) Type the following command: cl.exe /Oxs /MT /GS ComponentCheck.cpp advapi32.lib

d) Copy ComponentCheck.exe to the %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bootstrapper\Packages\Office2007PIA folder and the %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bootstrapper\Packages\Office2003PIA folder.

5. Download and extract the Office 2007 PIAs from 2007 Microsoft Office System Update: Redistributable Primary Interop Assemblies.

6. Copy the o2007pia.msi file to the %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bootstrapper\Packages\Office2007PIA folder.

7. In VS2008, on the Project menu, click ProjectName Properties.

8. Click the Publish tab.

9. Click the Prerequisites button to open the Prerequisites dialog box.

You should see the PIAs listed in the Prerequisites dialog box like the following image. Because the package.xml file does not define a HomeSite (a location to download the file), you will see a build warning. Even if you have selected Download prerequisites from the component vendor's web site, the PIAs will go into a directory alongside your solution installer.

If you want to learn more about adding your own entries to the Prerequisites dialog box, see Adding Custom Prerequisites.

For more information about common problems when deploying the Office primary interop assemblies, see http://blogs.msdn.com/vsto/archive/2008/05/20/common-pitfalls-during-pia-deployment-and-installation.aspx.

For troubleshooting assistance, try the VSTO Power Tools, a suite of tools to help you develop and deploy Office solutions. For example, you can use the VSTO Troubleshooter to examine end user computers for missing prerequisites.

Mary Lee, 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