Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Unleashed

Customizing the Task Pane

Task panes don’t have a dedicated visual designer because they are implemented through the creation of a user control, which already has a design surface. To add a custom task pane to our Word add-in, right-click the project, select Add New Item, and then select the Windows Forms User Control item.

Note

Because action panes are document-level concepts, we discuss those separately in the section “Creating an Office Document Extension” later in this chapter. The same general development process is followed.

After the user control is added and the designer is loaded, we can set about creating the UI and code-behind for the task pane. The only VSTO-specific action item here is wiring the task pane user control into Word’s ...