Visual Studio Tools for Office: Using Visual Basic 2005 with Excel, Word, Outlook, and InfoPath

13. The VSTO Programming Model

The VSTO Programming Model

In Windows Forms programming, a form is a window that contains controls, such as buttons and combo boxes. To implement a form, you can drag and drop controls from the Visual Studio toolbox onto the form’s designer. Then the form designer generates a customized subclass of the Form class. Because each form is implemented by its own class, you can customize the form code further by adding properties and methods of your own to the class. And because all the controls are added as properties on the form class, you can use IntelliSense to program those custom methods more rapidly.

The system of host items and host controls in VSTO is directly analogous to Windows Forms. By host, we mean the ...