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Summary

Praise forVSTO for Mere Mortalstrade;"This is the book I wish I'd had when I was first introduced to VSTO and the .NET Framework. It will be invaluable not only to those considering VSTO, but for anyone transitioning from Office VBA to Visual Basic.NET. The wide range of subjects covered provides an entry point for the more in-depth, developer-oriented documentation available on MSDN and elsewhere."Cindy Meister, MS Word MVP"VSTO for Mere Mortalstrade;does a great job of building a bridge between the worlds of VBA and VSTO. Kathleen and Paul show how a VBA developer can have the richness of Office and also the power, maintainability, and security of Visual Studio. They succeeded in writing a book that is approachable, understandable, and compelling."KD Hallman, General Manager, Microsoft, Developer Division"This book is an excellent choice for VBA developers looking to make the switch to .NET development for Office using Visual Studio Tools for Office. In many instances VB.NET code is presented alongside equivalent VBA code to help illustrate key conceptual and usage differences."Steve Hansen, OfficeZealot.com, author ofMastering Excel 2003 Programming with VBAand coauthor ofMastering Excel 2000 Premium Edition"Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office is the way to go for building managed Office applications. If you're moving from VBA to managed code, this book shows you the way."Ken Getz, Senior Consultant, MCW Technologies, LLC"This book is highly recommended for VBA developers who are interested in doing Office programming using the rich power of Visual Studio and .NET."Mei Liang, Software Design Engineer in Test, Microsoft"Kathleen McGrath has stuffedVSTO for Mere Mortalstrade;with in-depth code samples that demonstrate VSTO in an easy-to-understand way. From simple how-to's to advanced functionality, it's all here. I learned a great deal from reading this book."Justin Whitney, Technical Journalist"This book provides an instantly accessible resource for VBA and Office developers to become familiar with the powerful new Office development platform, but even goes beyond that, providing a number of 'worth the purchase of the book'tips, fully functional examples, and elegant methods from someone who has obviously spent a lot of time with these tools to help the mortal on the path to becoming a guru."Rory Plaire, Solutions Architect, DigitalCommons LLC"For the Office VBA developer interested in programming in .NET or the .NET programmer looking to move to the Office platform, this book is worth its weight in gold. If you are looking for a complete, well-written source to quickly get you up to speed to develop and program Office solutions in Visual Studio 2005, I believe this book is a must-have."Frank Rice, Programming Writer, Microsoft Office Developer Center"With this book, VBA developers have access to a great resource that will help them understand essential concepts of managed code and best practices to migrate VBA solutions to Visual Basic 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office. This book goes beyond an introduction to VSTO to introduce the new world of VSTO 2005 SE and the 2007 Microsoft Office system."Erika Ehrli Cabral, Site Manager, MSDN Office Developer Center, Microsoft"Kathleen and Paul have been involved with VSTO in one way or the other from its very beginnings, and it shows. Their depth and breadth of knowledge is reflected in this detailed and authoritative book. I highly recommend it for any professional developer making the transition from VBA to managed code."Eric Lippert, Software Design Engineer, MicrosoftVSTO for Mere Mortalstrade;is for VBA developers who are inter

Author Biography

Kathleen McGrath is a programming writer at Microsoft. She has written documentation for Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the Microsoft Office System (VSTO), Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA), and Visual Basic. Prior to joining Microsoft, she worked as a VBA developer customizing Word applications in the financial printing and legal industries. Kathleen has also created short video demonstrations of the features of VSTO and Visual Basic on her blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/kathleen.

Paul Stubbs works as a program manager with the Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) team at Microsoft. In addition to VSTO, Paul works with the VSTA team developing a new managed code application programmability development tool for InfoPath 2007 and independent software vendors (ISVs). Paul has written for MSDN Magazine and has spoken at such events as TechEd and TechReady. Paul also participates in the developer community on the Microsoft forums and his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/pstubbs.

Getting started with VSTO	p. 3
The programming environment	p. 27
Introduction to managed code	p. 89
Moving from VBA to VSTO and Visual Basic 2005	p. 129
Customizing Word and Excel task panes	p. 173
Customizing Word with VSTO	p. 207
Customizing Excel with VSTO	p. 273
Controls in Word and Excel	p. 351
Smart tags in Word and Excel	p. 417
Creating add-ins for Outlook with VSTO	p. 459
Security and deployment	p. 499
Migrating VBA solutions to VSTO	p. 531
Advanced topics in VSTO	p. 555
VSTO 2005 SE and the 2007 Microsoft Office system	p. 575
Creating code snippets	p. 651
Creating inspector CommandBars	p. 657
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

Supplemental Materials

What is included with this book?

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Excerpts

The target audience for Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) is the "professional developer." The term "professional developer" has several meanings, but the most agreed-upon definition we've heard is that it is someone who gets paid to write code. In other words, it's their primary job. It's not the departmental developer: the accountant who writes Excel macros as part of his accounting tasks or the word processing operator who customizes Word to increase her productivity. Instead, it is the .Net developer who might be interested in using Office as a development platform. Prior to joining Microsoft, we both worked as VBA developers, customizing Office applications, and were very much interested in learning about managed code. We don't think that we are unique in that respect. There are millions of VBA developers today, many of whom are interested in learning about this next generation of Office development. Current books and documentation for VSTO are typically not written with the VBA developer in mindit's assumed that the developer is familiar with Visual Studio, object-oriented programming, and the .NET Framework. The focus is (understandably) more on the features of VSTO, and how to work with the hefty Office object models. We wanted to write a book for the VBA developer audience, and while you might not be familiar with .NET programming, this is where you have an advantage. You already are an Office developer who most likely has a lot of experience with manipulating the Office object models, as well as possessing power-user knowledge of the application. We can't think of a better environment to learn about managed code than within the context of something you are already familiar with: Office development. VSTO brings Office development to the .NET world, and it has both disadvantages and advantages over using VBA. There are some amazing things you can do to customize Word, Excel. and Outlook with relative ease using VSTO (e.g., creating a customized task pane, adding smart tags to a document, and binding objects on a document to a data source). With the VSTO 2005 SE, you can create add-ins for six Office applications, customize the new ribbon UI feature of Microsoft Office 2007, and create application-level custom task panes. We've had the advantage of working with the folks who designed, coded, tested, and documented VSTO, all of whom we have learned a great deal from. We've had an insider view of VSTO, and we hope to convey that information to you in an understandable and enjoyable manner.