Chapter 16. Customizing the Access Ribbon with a Visual Studio 2005 Shared Add-in
IN THIS CHAPTER
Customizing the Ribbon with a Visual Studio 2005 Shared add-in
A comparison of Access and Visual Studio add-ins
In Chapter 13, I described creating a VB 6 COM add-in to add extra functionality to Access. VB 6 (though still supported by Microsoft) is not the latest version of Visual Basic; if you want to use the latest version, that is VB 2005, included in Visual Studio 2005, available in several editions. There are significant differences between these versions of VB and some compatibility problems with Office 2007, but you can create Visual Studio 2005 add-ins that work with Access, though at present the job is much harder than it should be, and their functionality is limited, because the Visual Studio Tools for Office add-in does not yet include an Access add-in template.
This chapter describes creating a simple Visual Studio Shared add-in for Access that will run in both Windows XP and Windows Vista.
Preparing to Write a Visual Studio Add-in
Before you start writing a Visual Studio add-in, there are several preliminary steps you need to take. The first is to check that.NET support is enabled for Office, to support the Access interoperability component needed to work with Access.
Adding .NET Support to Office
Since your installation of Office 2007 may not have .NET support enabled, you need to check that this feature has been selected; it is required in order to create Shared add-ins. To ...
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