Posts Tagged ‘.NET’
Outlook 2013 add-in development for beginners: Outlook Application & base objects
Ty Anderson | April 17th, 2013
Working with a new framework takes time as you familiarize yourself with its architecture and best practices. You have to spend time discovering objects, learning what they do, and when it is best to utilize them. For Outlook add-in development (and Microsoft Office development in general), this task can take months due to the number of objects involved... Read the rest of this entry →
Excel 2013 add-ins in Visual Studio 2012: Getting started for VSTO developers
Pieter van der Westhuizen | April 8th, 2013
In this article we'll have a look at how you, as a VSTO developer, can get started developing add-ins for Excel using Add-in Express and Visual Studio 2012.... Read the rest of this entry →
Enterprise development of Office solutions with Add-in Express
Ty Anderson | March 29th, 2013
Microsoft Office based solutions take various forms and sizes. What began with the ability to write (and record) scripts to automate Office documents on a user's desktop has evolved to the ability to create full-fledged extensions. These extensions often work across multiple apps in the Office suite and expand beyond a single user's desktop.... Read the rest of this entry →
Range Selection in Excel add-ins – other good manners for developers
Eugene Starostin | March 22nd, 2013
In my yesterday's article I started to muse on Excel's Range Selection and what can be considered good practices for Excel add-in developers. Well, there are some other good manners for the Range Selection. And if you have a closer look at the user interface of Microsoft Excel itself and some popular Excel add-ins, you will find out pretty convenient behavior of the Range Selection functionality like follows below... Read the rest of this entry →
Range Selection in Excel add-ins – good manners for developers
Eugene Starostin | March 21st, 2013
Having been fully absorbed in developing our frameworks for a while, I lost any connection with the other part of our business - ablebits.com. Doh, I shouldn't have allowed this to happen. I clearly realized that on last Saturday evening when, to the wailing of snow storm Xavier raging across this country, I installed the latest version of the Excel Ultimate Suite on my laptop... Read the rest of this entry →
VDProj to WiX Converter is released!
Dmitry Kostochko | March 20th, 2013
Only one month has passed since we published the first beta and here I am announcing the release of our new product - VDProj to WiX Converter. If you have at least a couple of Visual Studio setup projects that you need to support and develop further, this tool is definitely worth trying
... Read the rest of this entry →
Excel 2013 single document interface (SDI): How to rebuild your task panes to support it
Pieter van der Westhuizen | February 28th, 2013
If you're an avid user of Excel, you would've noticed that Excel 2013 has moved from being a Multi document interface (MDI) application to being a Single document interface (SDI) application... Read the rest of this entry →
How to dynamically bind Outlook add-in UI elements to the context
Pieter van der Westhuizen | January 29th, 2013
Something that I've noticed is that if you want to really start bending Microsoft Outlook to your programming will, you need to start embracing and combining the use of message classes and content types when developing Outlook add-ins... Read the rest of this entry →
Creating a shared ribbon for Office 2013: Word, Excel and PowerPoint
Ty Anderson | January 17th, 2013
In this article, I want to show you how can create single Microsoft Office 2013 and 2010 ribbon and share it with Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. This scenario is one of many where Add-in Express shines. Using the Add-in Express framework, you can easily build a shared ribbon in a matter of minutes. Best of all, you can also quickly configure your controls to display (or not to display) in the Office host applications your add-in targets... Read the rest of this entry →
How to create custom Outlook rules and execute them programmatically: C# example
Pieter van der Westhuizen | December 13th, 2012
The Microsoft Outlook Rules is a very powerful feature that can sometimes get lost amongst the myriad other features and abilities of Outlook. Many Outlook programmers do not realise that Microsoft introduced a new rules object model in Outlook 2007 allowing developers to harness the power of Outlook rules... Read the rest of this entry →
How to replace built-in Outlook dialogs with custom forms
Pieter van der Westhuizen | December 5th, 2012
Years ago I found this article by Helmut Obertanner on CodeProject. In this article Helmut explains how you can replace the built-in Outlook Address book dialog with your own form. I was amazed and intrigued! This approach is a great way to provide your users with a custom address form that is able to retrieve contact address information from literally any source e.g. CRM or customer database... Read the rest of this entry →
How to merge several Office add-in projects into one binary
Pieter van der Westhuizen | November 27th, 2012
Before we have a look at the sample project, let's first examine the scenario for when you might want to consider using this approach. In the case of the Ultimate Suite for Excel, loading was a crucial factor, by following this approach the team effectively reduced the loading time by nearly 60%, because only one assembly needs to be loaded instead of 20+ separate ones
... Read the rest of this entry →
Creating modular Office add-ins using Add-in Express
Pieter van der Westhuizen | November 19th, 2012
When creating a new Office extension with Add-in Express for Office and .net you have the option to design your entire add-in user interface using our visual designers, by simply dropping the various components on the design surface of the AddinModule. This is fine for most Office add-ins especially when you do not require a […]... Read the rest of this entry →
Creating WiX installation projects for VSTO-based Office add-ins
Pieter van der Westhuizen | November 13th, 2012
In the last two articles, I've shown you how to create a WiX installer for Add-in Express based add-ons from scratch and how to convert your existing setup projects to WiX. In this blog, I'll show you how to create a WiX installer for Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) based Office add-in projects... Read the rest of this entry →
HowTo: Create add-ins for Office 2007, 2010 and 2013 with a shared ribbon tab
Eugene Astafiev | November 5th, 2012
Office developers need to merge the UI of their add-ins into a single ribbon tab. Just imagine the following scenario: a user wants to install a few COM add-ins from the same vendor. Are they going to get a separate ribbon tab for each add-in's UI?... Read the rest of this entry →
Create custom Outlook menus: VB.NET and C# for Outlook 2013-2003
Ty Anderson | October 22nd, 2012
It looks like Microsoft is going to go ahead and release Office 2013 sooner rather than later. I suppose you can argue they already have with the recent pre-ordering of Windows Surface (which comes with Office 2013 RT). Whether or not you consider Office 2013 RT to really be Office is up to you. It can be your opinion
... Read the rest of this entry →