Microsoft® .NET Development for Microsoft Office

Chapter 2. Basics of Office Interoperability

In this chapter, we’ll introduce all the basic concepts of interoperation between Microsoft .NET managed code and Microsoft Office applications. We’ll also explore some practical examples that demonstrate how to develop managed applications using Office. The basic mechanics demonstrated in this chapter will form the basis of all later techniques presented in this book.

Office applications are COM servers, so the basis of the interoperation between Office applications and .NET code is COM Interop. The .NET Framework has good support for interaction with COM components, COM+ services, and native operating system services. Code executing under the control of the common language runtime (the CLR, or just ...