Andrew Whitechapel
Shiny things that caught my eye
Do You Know the Way to San José
Momentum is gathering for the 2008 Office Developer Conference, and here's the skinny: When:...
Author: Garry Trinder Date: 12/07/2007
Implement ICustomTaskPaneConsumer in C++
The new extensibility interfaces introduced in Office 2007 are implementable via add-ins. Add-ins...
Author: Garry Trinder Date: 12/05/2007
VSTO + WPF + WCF + LINQ (MSDN Article)
There's an article in this month's MSDN magazine on building Office-based solutions using VSTO with...
Author: Garry Trinder Date: 11/26/2007
COM Shim CLR Loader Bug
The latest version of the COM shim wizards was released back in the summer, here. With the help of...
Author: Garry Trinder Date: 11/25/2007
Sharing Code Between Add-ins
Suppose you want to build a Ribbon customization, or a custom task pane, and you want to use this...
Author: Garry Trinder Date: 11/24/2007
Preserving the alpha channel when converting images
Here is a guest post by Eric Faller, Ribbon developer guru and all-round nice guy. It's a follow-up...
Author: Garry Trinder Date: 10/10/2007
WPF in VSTO
Can you use WPF controls in VSTO solutions, and if so, how? VSTO's mission is to bring together the...
Author: Garry Trinder Date: 08/15/2007
Converting between IPictureDisp and System.Drawing.Image
This is an interesting manifestation of the gap between COM-based native servers, such as the Office...
Author: Garry Trinder Date: 07/30/2007
Updated COM Shim Wizards
In our spare time, Misha and I have been working on and off on the COM Shim and associated COM Shim...
Author: Garry Trinder Date: 07/05/2007
Can you build one add-in for multiple versions of Office?
This of course is the advantage of using the old "shared add-in" project types – you can build one...
Author: Garry Trinder Date: 06/16/2007
Why is VS development not supported with multiple versions of Office?
First, the Office client apps are COM-based. Normal COM activation relies on the registry. COM...
Author: Garry Trinder Date: 06/08/2007
Office 2007 New Extensibility Interfaces
Office 2007 introduced a set of new extensibility interfaces. Prior to Office 2007, there were...
Author: Garry Trinder Date: 05/30/2007
Editable TreeView
As I was updating the COM Shim Wizards (the new version should be published in a couple of weeks), I...
Author: Garry Trinder Date: 05/24/2007
Why is it so hard to shim IRibbonExtensibility?
The COM Shim Wizards are a set of Visual Studio 2005 project wizards that automate the generation of...
Author: Garry Trinder Date: 03/09/2007
Microsoft .NET Development for Microsoft Office
A number of people have reported that the link to the companion content seems to be broken. MSPress...
Author: Garry Trinder Date: 02/25/2007
VSTO Add-ins, COMAddIns and RequestComAddInAutomationService
The COMAddIns property is a collection of COMAddIn objects exposed by Office applications that...
Author: Garry Trinder Date: 01/15/2007
COM Developers are from Mars, VBA Developers are from Venus, or: Typing, Binding and Wrapping in Office Development
I paused over my final mince pie today, and pondered the psychology of Office developers (as one...
Author: Garry Trinder Date: 01/08/2007
Low-level support for ICustomTaskPaneConsumer, IRibbonExtensibility, FormRegionStartup, etc.
I’m mostly interested in the runtime aspects of VSTO, and less interested in the RAD design-time...
Author: Garry Trinder Date: 12/23/2006
Multiple Instances of Custom Form Regions
In my last post, I considered the final state of the FormRegionStartup interface, with the 2 new...
Author: Garry Trinder Date: 11/29/2006
GetFormRegionIcon and GetFormRegionManifest
The Outlook FormRegionStartup interface was enhanced right before Office 2007 was released. Two new...
Author: Garry Trinder Date: 11/24/2006
Synchronizing Ribbon and Task Pane
The new custom task pane model in Office 2007 is interesting. It certainly opens up a wide range of...
Author: Garry Trinder Date: 10/20/2006
The Anomalous Behavior of Custom Task Panes in Word and InfoPath
Try this: create an add-in for Excel/Outlook/PowerPoint/Access with a custom task pane. Run the...
Author: Garry Trinder Date: 08/14/2006
Custom Task Panes: Doc-Level and App-Level
With VSTO 2005, you can build doc-level custom task panes (although we called them ActionsPanes)....
Author: Garry Trinder Date: 07/31/2006
Excel Interop Types in Shimmed Automation Add-ins
In my previous posts on shimming Excel automation add-in UDFs, I've used simple examples where the...
Author: Garry Trinder Date: 07/23/2006
COM Shim Wizards v2
Today we release v2 of the COM Shim Wizards. These are updated versions of the wizards we released...
Author: Garry Trinder Date: 06/09/2006
The Evolution of VSTO ‘v3’
We have two main reasons for releasing early builds of VSTO v3. The first is to unblock developers...
Author: Garry Trinder Date: 04/04/2006
VSTO 'v3' CTP Released
As you can imagine, we're working hard on the early stages of our Orcas release of Visual Studio....
Author: Garry Trinder Date: 03/25/2006
Jobs on the VSTO and VSTA Teams at Microsoft
Would you like to help realize the vision of Office as a development platform? Do you want your work...
Author: Garry Trinder Date: 03/03/2006
VSTO Embraces MAF
VSTO was originally designed to support the building of managed extensions to Office applications....
Author: Garry Trinder Date: 02/21/2006
Converging the Office Add-in Model
Over the years, Office has exposed a number of different extensibility mechanisms, which all enable...
Author: Garry Trinder Date: 02/18/2006
Interaction Between Loaded Add-ins
Can you talk across add-ins? With the old IDTExtensibility2 model? With the new VSTO model? COM...
Author: Garry Trinder Date: 10/04/2005