Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Unleashed

Office-Based Solutions

Developers have been able to customize Office for a long time now; some of us still remember writing Excel macros on Windows 3.1 or automating Word with Word Basic. Thankfully, these days the tools used to write Office solutions are built into Visual Studio. With them, you can create Office-based projects and solutions that leverage Word, Excel, Project, Visio, PowerPoint, Outlook, and InfoPath. Figure 1.7 shows the New Project dialog for Office solutions. The templates shown in the figure are for C#, but the same exist for Visual Basic.

Figure 1.7 The many Office project templates inside Visual Studio.

There are a few scenarios ...