Visual Studio Tools for Office 2007: VSTO for Excel, Word, and Outlook (Volume 1-2) - Softcover

Carter, Eric; Lippert, Eric

3.71

14 ratings by Goodreads

9780321533210: Visual Studio Tools for Office 2007: VSTO for Excel, Word, and Outlook (Volume 1-2)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0321533216 ISBN 13: 9780321533210

Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional, 2009

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Visual Studio Tools for Office 2007: VSTO for Excel, Word, and Outlook is the definitive book on VSTO 2008 programming, written by the inventors of the technology. VSTO is a set of tools that allows professional developers to use the full power of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework to program against Microsoft Office 2007.

This book delivers in one place all the information you need to succeed using VSTO to program against Word 2007, Excel 2007, and Outlook 2007, and provides the necessary background to customize Visio 2007, Publisher 2007, and PowerPoint 2007. It introduces the Office 2007 object models, covers the most commonly used objects in those object models, and will help you avoid the pitfalls caused by the COM origins of the Office object models. Developers who wish to program against Office 2003 should consult Carter and Lippert’s previous book, Visual Studio Tools for Office.

In VSTO 2008, you can build add-ins for all the major Office 2007 applications, build application-level custom task panes, customize the new Office Ribbon, modify Outlook’s user interface using Form Regions, and easily deploy everything you build using ClickOnce.

Carter and Lippert cover their subject matter with deft insight into the needs of .NET developers learning VSTO, based on the deep knowledge that comes from the authors’ unique perspective of living and breathing VSTO for the past six years. This book

Explains the architecture of Microsoft Office programming and introduces the object models
Covers the main ways Office applications are customized and extended
Explores the ways of customizing Excel, Word, and Outlook, and plumbs the depths of programming with their events and
object models
Introduces the VSTO programming model
Teaches how to use Windows Forms and WPF in VSTO and how to work with the Document Actions Pane and application-level task panes
Delves into VSTO data programming and server data scenarios
Teaches ClickOnce VSTO deployment

This is the one book you need to succeed in programming against Office 2007.

NOTE: This is now a two volume set

C# and Visual Basic .NET Code samples for download can be found here: http://www.informit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0321533216

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Eric Carter is a development manager on the Visual Studio team at Microsoft. He helped invent, design, and implement many of the features that are in VSTO today. Previously at Microsoft he worked on Visual Studio for Applications, the Visual Studio Macros IDE, and Visual Basic for Applications for Office 2000 and Office 2003.

Eric Lippert’s primary focus during his twelve years at Microsoft has been on improving the lives of developers by designing and implementing useful programming languages and development tools. He has worked on the Windows Scripting family of technologies, Visual Studio Tools for Office, and, most recently, on the C# compiler team.

Preface

Preface

In 2002 the first release of Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework was nearing completion. A few of us at Microsoft realized that Office programming was going to miss the .NET wave unless we did something about it.

What had come before was Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), a simple development environment integrated into all the Office applications. Each Office application had a rich object model that was accessed via a technology known as COM. Millions of developers identified themselves as “Office developers” and used VBA and the Office COM object models to do everything from automating repetitive tasks to creating complete business solutions that leveraged the rich features and user interface of Office. These developers realized that their users were spending their days in Office. By building solutions that ran inside Office, they not only made their users happy, but also were able to create solutions that did more and cost less by reusing functionality already available in the Office applications.

Unfortunately, because of some limitations of VBA, Office programming was starting to get a bad rap. Solutions developed in VBA by small workgroups or individuals would gain momentum, and a professional developer would have to take them over and start supporting them. To a professional developer, the VBA environment felt simple and limited, and of course, it enforced a single language: Visual Basic. VBA embedded code in every customized document, which made it hard to fix bugs and update solutions because a bug would get replicated in documents across the enterprise. Security weaknesses in the VBA model led to a rash of worms and macro viruses that made enterprises turn VBA off.

Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework provided a way to address all these problems. A huge opportunity existed not only to combine the richness of the new .NET Framework and developer tools with the powerful platform that Office has always provided for developers, but also to solve the problems that were plaguing VBA. The result of this realization was Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO).

The first version of VSTO was simple, but it accomplished the key goal of letting professional developers use the full power of Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework to put code behind Excel 2003 and Word 2003 documents and templates. It let professional developers develop Office solutions in Visual Basic and C#. It solved the problem of embedded code by linking a document to a .NET assembly instead of embedding it in the document. It also introduced a new security model that used .NET code-access security to prevent worms and macro viruses.

The second version of VSTO, known as VSTO 2005, was even more ambitious. It brought with it functionality never available to the Office developer before, such as data binding and data/view separation, design-time views of Excel and Word documents inside Visual Studio, rich support for Windows Forms controls in the document, the ability to create custom Office task panes, server-side programming support against Office—and that’s just scratching the surface. Although the primary target of VSTO is the professional developer, that does not mean that building an Office solution with VSTO is rocket science. VSTO makes it possible to create very rich applications with just a few lines of code.

The third version of VSTO, which this book focuses on, shipped as a core feature of Visual Studio 2008. It is sometimes said that it takes Microsoft three versions to get something right, and we truly feel that this version of VSTO has the most amazing support for Office programming that Microsoft has ever built. In VSTO, you can now build add-ins for all the major Office applications; you can build application-level custom task panes; you can customize the new Office Ribbon; you can modify Outlook’s UI using Forms Regions, and you can easily deploy everything you build using ClickOnce. The Office 2007 applications themselves are more extensible and provide many new programmability features.

If you’ve been reluctant to use VSTO because of the issues in previous versions—such as the difficulty of deployment, the nonsupport of VSTO in the Visual Studio Professional SKU, and the limited support for add-ins—we’re happy to tell you that these issues have been fixed in the third version of VSTO.

This book tries to put in one place all the information you need to succeed using VSTO to program against Word 2007, Excel 2007, and Outlook 2007. It introduces the Office 2007 object models and covers the most commonly used objects in those object models. In addition, this book helps you avoid some pitfalls that result from the COM origins of the Office object models. This book also provides necessary backround for developers using VSTO to customize Visio 2007, Publisher 2007, PowerPoint 2007, and InfoPath 2007. Although it doesn’t specifically focus on these applications, it teaches how to use the VSTO add-in model, how to create custom task panes and ribbons, and how to code against Office object models using C#.

This book also provides an insider view of all the rich features of VSTO. We participated in the design and implementation of many of these features; therefore, we can speak from the unique perspective of living and breathing VSTO for the past six years. Programming Office using VSTO is powerful and fun. We hope you enjoy using VSTO as much as we enjoyed writing about it and creating it.

—Eric Carter
—Eric Lippert
January 2009

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.