Office Development with Visual Studio : WPF

Using Windows Presentation Foundation and Line-of-Business Data in Microsoft Office Clients (Beth Massi)

VSTO Team — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 02:24:00 GMT

I mentioned on my blog yesterday that SDN Magazine made an article I wrote back in May available online -- and since it’s all about using WPF & data in a VSTO solution I thought I’d post the link up here too :-)

Using Windows Presentation Foundation and Line-of-Business Data in Microsoft Office Clients

In this article I talk about how to expose Line-of-Business data via ADO.NET Data Services to an Excel client using WPF. Office solutions you build with Visual Studio are designed to work with Windows Forms controls but you can also use WPF controls in your solutions as well. Any UI element that can host Windows Forms controls in an Office solution (VSTO) can also host WPF controls using the Winforms ElementHost as a container.

Using WPF controls in Office allows you to think out of the box and provide world-class data visualizations that are not possible with Windows Forms controls. And you can do it easily in an instantly familiar end-user application like those in the Office family. But what if you don’t have any fancy data visualizations? Even the simplest controls that display data are often better off as WPF controls in Office applications because they better match the UI styles used in the latest versions of Office. Using WPF can make your add-ins look built into the Office applications themselves, providing a better user experience.

This article describes one piece of the Northwind Office Business Application (OBA) sample we created in the beginning of the year so if you’re just getting started in OBA development with Outlook, Word, Excel and Sharepoint I’d suggest reading these as well:

OBA Part 1 - Exposing Line-of-Business Data

OBA Part 2 - Building and Outlook Client against LOB Data

OBA Part 3 - Storing and Reading Data in Word Documents

OBA Part 4 - Building an Excel Client against LOB Data

OBA Part 5 - Building the SharePoint 2007 Workflow

The full sample application, built with Visual Studio 2008, is here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/OBANorthwind

Hmm… I’m thinking a part 6 on deployment of this baby would be a good follow up….

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

Demonstrating how to sync Facebook events to Outlook

VSTO Team — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 19:59:07 GMT

Every once in a while, we learn of neat apps that have been created with the Office development tools in Visual Studio. In an Outlook 2007 add-in, Jake Ginnivan combined WPF and the Facebook API to respond to Facebook events from a Ribbon. In addition, this add-in works in Outlook 2010 and has been deployed with ClickOnce. He’s written about this in two parts:

Writing a Facebook event synchroniser for Outlook 2007+ Part 1

Writing a Facebook event synchroniser for Outlook 2007+ Part 2

If you have come across other VSTO apps, feel free to leave a link in a comment here.

Mary Lee, Programming Writer.

WPF in Office Solutions (Harry Miller)

VSTO Team — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:01:56 GMT

A few months ago, Andrew Whitechapel wrote an article and sample application that demonstrates combining the native capabilities of an Office client application with the UI capabilities of WPF. Behind the UI, the application is connected to remote data and services via WCF and uses the RAD features of LINQ to manipulate that data.

Some related questions have come up in the forum recently, so McLean Schofield took the sample application and made a short video overview of the WPF control part. You can find the full explanation and get the code from these articles:

Build Office-Based Solutions Using WPF, WCF, And LINQ - MSDN Magazine article by Andrew Whitechapel

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163292.aspx

Andrew Whitechapel's blog post, which has a link to updated code

http://blogs.msdn.com/andreww/archive/2007/11/26/vsto-wpf-wcf-linq-msdn-article.aspx

Video duration: 4 minutes, 23 seconds