Share via

Enhancements for Visual Studio Users

  • Article

This content is no longer actively maintained. It is provided as is, for anyone who may still be using these technologies, with no warranties or claims of accuracy with regard to the most recent product version or service release.

Although the tools and components provided with Microsoft® Office 2000 Developer are designed primarily with the VBA environment in mind, some of these tools can also help make the development process easier for the Visual Studio® developer. The two primary areas where the Office 2000 Developer tools are useful are:

  • Developing COM Add-Ins for Office 2000

  • Sharing and Reusing Code

Developing COM Add-Ins for Office 2000

Office 2000 provides an extensibility interface that can be exposed by add-ins created in Microsoft Visual Basic®, Visual C++®, and Visual J++™, allowing the add-ins to connect and disconnect from any Office host application.

Developing application extensions for Microsoft Office 2000 using COM has many distinct advantages. Visual Studio provides a number of tools that are currently not provided in the Visual Basic Editor (VBE). This means that developers can now develop solutions for Office 2000 with any language that can create COM components. The add-ins created all use the same extensibility model and user interface to connect and disconnect to any and all Office host applications. Office now has one unified development environment and add-in model.

To facilitate the development of Office applications from within Visual Studio, Microsoft Office 2000 Developer includes a number of templates that can be used in Visual Studio to create add-ins targeted for Office applications.

The COM Add-In templates for Visual Basic, Visual C++, and Visual J++ are located on the Microsoft Office 2000 Developer CD in the ..\ODETools\V9\Samples\Unsupprt directory.

For more information about using these templates, refer to the readme files in each sample directory and to the white paper included in the \Samples directory.

Sharing and Reusing Code

The Code Librarian is a stand-alone application that allows you to access a database of code snippets. You can easily insert code from the Code Librarian into your Visual Studio application.

For more information about using the Code Librarian, see Sharing and Reusing Source Code.