‘Add-in Express for Office and .net’ category archive

Excel shapes events: getting notified about user actions

The Excel object model doesn't have any events purposed for manipulations with shapes. In this blog I demonstrate an approach to solving this problem... Read the rest of this entry →

Add-in Express vs. VSTO: Visual designers for Office Ribbon UI customization

Creating a Microsoft Office add-in prototype is certainly much faster with the help of Add-in Express's visual designers. The visual designers help you to very quickly and easily build complex Office UI's as well as customize the existing MS Office UI... Read the rest of this entry →

How To: Create a new Task item in Outlook

In my previous posts I have described how to create a new e-mail message, contact and appointment items. Today I am going to cover task items... Read the rest of this entry →

Using Word Dialogs programmatically: C# sample

This blog is about a sample add-in project (with source code) demonstrating how to use Word dialogs programmatically. With this add-in you can check if a given dialog is suitable for your task or get version-specific information about that dialog and its properties... Read the rest of this entry →

Version-neutrality for your Office extensions: Add-in Express vs. VSTO

I have to be honest. I have become very spoiled with Add-in Express when it comes to Microsoft Office development, a fact that I once again realized after a discussion with the gang about Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) and Add-in Express... Read the rest of this entry →

Add-in Express vs. Visual Studio Tools for Office

Almost four years to this day, I wrote about the new Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) available in the latest release of Visual Studio 2008. I've also later posted an update that I've found a much more efficient way of developing for Microsoft Office; and that way was of course Add-in Express!... Read the rest of this entry →

Video: Create an Office shared add-in – building a custom Click Twice deployment package

The video, Part 5, is the last of the series. In this 15-ish minute video, you will learn how to build a Click Twice deployment package for the MyTasks add-in. Click Twice is one of the major strengths of the Add-in Express toolset... Read the rest of this entry →

Outlook 2010 Solutions Module revisited

It's been a year and seven months since my first article about the Outlook 2010 Solutions Module. Time sure flies when you're having fun. Since I first wrote the article, I received numerous comments and questions about the Outlook 2010 Solutions module, mostly on how to programmatically add items to it... Read the rest of this entry →

Video: Create an Office shared add-in – connecting business logic to Office events

On Tuesday we published Part 3 of the end-to-end demo. Today, we have Part 4. In reality parts 3 and 4 can be taken together but we thought it's better to break them up a bit and provide a bit of a break. But we have momentum now so let's keep this train a-moving because Part 5 is almost ready for its debut as well.... Read the rest of this entry →

Video: Create an Office shared add-in – interacting with Office object models & events

I admit some time has passed since we produced parts 1 and part 2 of our end-to-end demo. I'll take the blame for it. It's okay. But I want you to know the remaining parts have been sitting in my Outlook Tasks folder… staring at me… taunting me. ... Read the rest of this entry →

Office 365 – Attach files from SharePoint to Outlook E-mail programmatically

In my last post, Save Outlook e-mails & attachments to SharePoint Online programmatically, I showed you how you can write a Microsoft Outlook Add-in that will save all the attachments on an e-mail to the Office 365 SharePoint Online Shared Documents library. In today's post I would like to show you how to do the opposite, e.g. how to attach files from SharePoint Online to Outlook e-mail messages. This could be useful if your customer has a shared library with documents they send via e-mail on a regular basis. ... Read the rest of this entry →

How to load your Office COM add-in on condition

A typical problem is: how to unload my add-in if a custom condition is met. This blog post is about how to solve this problem.... Read the rest of this entry →

Office 365 – Save Outlook e-mails & attachments to SharePoint Online programmatically

If you're following Ty's Office 365 Newswires and read this article about Microsoft already having sold five million Office 365 seats in roughly two and a half months, I'm sure you would agree with me that Office 365 is set to change, if not revolutionize the way people use and interact with Microsoft Office. ... Read the rest of this entry →

How to navigate through the Microsoft Office Command Bar system

There are 4 instances of the command bar button "Save" (Id=3) in Excel. Two of them are best known: a button on the Standard commandbar and an item in the File menu. The other two instances are buried in the command bar system... Read the rest of this entry →

HowTo: get the actual type name behind System.__ComObject with Visual C# or VB.NET

Developers accessing Application.Selection and Application.ActiveSheet in Excel or Explorer.Selection.Item(i), Folder.Items(j), Inspector.CurrentItem in Outlook do know the notorious "System.__ComObject" string. It indicates that the actual type of the COM object is unknown... Read the rest of this entry →

How to handle Outlook item’s Reply event: replying from a context-menu

Let's consider the case then the user replies to an Outlook e-mail from the context menu. First off, you can reply to one item only; that item is selected or right-clicked in an explorer window or is opened in an inspector window.... Read the rest of this entry →

Have any questions? Ask us right now!