Video: How Microsoft Office abuses its developers and how Add-in Express stops this
If you have any experience in developing solutions on the Office platform, you have most likely learnt that Office has the tendency to abuse its developers. One of the main reasons for this is that Office is comprised of several different applications like Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint and Word, and each of these applications has their own object model that you need to understand and master when building your solutions. The situation of abuse is exacerbated by the fact that in any organization at one time you might have more than 1 version of Office in use, so Office 2013, 2010, 2007 and 2003 thus requiring that any solution you build supports not only multiple host applications but also multiple versions of Office.
Now, to stop this abuse, what’s needed is the framework that contains a toolset allowing you to support multiple Office applications in your solutions as well as multiple Office versions. And this is where Add-in Express comes into play.
The video was created especially for the Add-in Express feature tour, hope you’ll enjoy it!
4 Comments
Ty,
Agreed, what surprise me is the lack of discussion in the on-line community. It seems to appear that the average Office developer assume that these kind of shortcomings is the price to pay for working with the Office suite. One of my early applications that I developed with Add-in Express is still in use 24/7 around the globe with a great number of users. So far there has been no reports about issues with the Office version(s) in use and my application. I think it speaks for itself. What is notable indirectly is the less requirements of support. What also comes as a positive side-affect by using Add-in Express is that we for less complex application can create robust installation projects in no time.
Keep up the good work guys!
Kind regards,
Dennis
Hi Dennis!
You make two great points. For some reason Office Developers seem okay with the fact that Microsoft tools do not support targeting multiple Office versions out of the box. I am not sure why we seem to be so good natured about it. Also, your point about building installation projects is well taken. I think this is definitely one of the key areas where Add-In-Express shines.
This excel project, send me?
Sorry, it is not quite clear what Excel project you are asking about. In this video Ty demonstrated the main features of Add-in Express for Office and .net, which is a framework for developing extensions for Outlook, Excel, Word and other Office applications.
If you are asking about something else, please clarify.