Professional Visual Studio 2012

Chapter 19

Office Business Applications

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Exploring the different ways to extend Microsoft Office
• Creating a Microsoft Word document customization
• Creating a Microsoft Outlook add-in
• Launching and debugging an Office application
• Packaging and deploying an Office application

Microsoft Office applications have always been extensible via add-ins and various automation techniques. Even Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), which was widely known for various limitations in accessing system files, had the capability to write applications that used an instance of an Office application to achieve certain tasks, such as Word’s spell-checking feature.

When Visual Studio .NET was released in 2002, Microsoft soon followed with the first release of Visual Studio Tools for Office (known by the abbreviation VSTO, pronounced “visto”). This initial version of VSTO didn’t actually produce anything new except for an easier way to create application projects that would use Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel. However, subsequent versions of VSTO quickly evolved and became more powerful, enabling you to build more functional applications that ran on the Office platform.

The latest version of VSTO was shipped as part of Visual Studio 2010. It provides many useful features, including support for Office 2010, support for the Ribbon user interface, and packaging and deployment functionality.

This chapter begins with a look at the types of applications you can build with VSTO. It then ...