Top review for Add-in Express products
Add-in Express reviewsWhat do you usually do when considering purchasing a new software tool? Since you are on this page, the answer is obvious - look for reviews on the web :) We also usually do the same because there is no better way to assess a product than to rely on the first-hand experience of professional who have already tried it. On this page, you will find some Add-in Express reviews written by different people starting from respected gurus, MVPs and authors of books on programming to your fellow developers and software engineers.
Add-in Express for Office and .net reviewsBuild Office apps with Add-in ExpressBy Peter Vogel for Visual Studio Magazine
Automating Microsoft Office has never been for the faint of heart. While Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) allows developers to use the Microsoft .NET Framework to create Office add-ins, you often spend as much time writing and debugging the utility code that integrates your add-in with Office as you do actually adding functionality. Even if your add-in worked when installed, the differences between versions of Office could stop your add-in cold if your users upgraded. Add-in Express dramatically simplifies the process of creating and deploying Office add-ins. For instance, when creating an add-in, you can specify which versions of Office you want to support, beginning with an "Office neutral" option that supports all versions beginning with Office 2000. You can also, when starting your project, specify which Office components you want to support - Add-in Express automatically generates the necessary support code. Read the whole review: visualstudiomagazine.com Add-in Express for Microsoft Office and .NETBy Dennis Wallentin, MVP, author of "Professional Excel Development"
Recently I have added a new tool to my toolbox - the Add-in Express for Microsoft .Net from Add-in Express. For the last weeks I've been working extensively with this tool and in my opinion it's a great utility. It shares the common aspects with the other mentioned components and tools. Compared with the built-in Shared Add-in in Visual Studio.NET Add-in Express offer several advantages like: it can contain several add-ins in one assembly; it can create version independed (neutral) Interop Assemblies (IA) that are automatically added to the setup project. In other words, we don't need to consider which version of Excel is available or if any PIAs/IAs are available or not on the targeting machines. If needed we can add additional prerequisites to the Add-in Express projects in the usual way... Read the whole review: xldennis.wordpress.com A review of Add-in ExpressBy Ken Puls, Excel guru and blogger
A while ago I started transitioning from VBA to VB.NET, attempting to build a tool to manipulate the new Power Pivot components in Excel 2013... I can honestly say that I fought the Power Pivot crash issue for about 2 months with VSTO, and I was really worried that it was going to kill my project completely. No amount of searching would turn up a fix, and other help calls didn't yield any gold either; where they were answered, it was with a "don't know" answer. Add-in Express has actually made this goal achievable. I'll also tell you that I have been able to use Add-in Express to successfully target and manipulate Power Pivot in both 32 and 64 bit versions of both Excel 2010 and 2013. I.e. multi version deployment with one code base. Pretty damn awesome. Here's my word on Add-in Express: I'm sold. This product has been a life saver, and I won�t develop using VSTO... Read the whole review: excelguru.ca Review: Add-in Express for Office and .NETby Bernard Vukas, software developer and blogger
Add-in Express is a framework for C# and VB.NET developers, that allows you to create version-neutral COM add-ins that run inside your favorite Microsoft Office desktop application. It comes with an awesome set of designers, such as the Ribbon designer, which I'll touch upon later. It also eases your installer development, by providing a setup wizard that does all the heavy lifting for you. That alone might have you jumping over to check out Add-in Express. There is a lot to like about this product. It�s been on my radar for years and I used it on more than a few dozen client projects. It was fantastic. Read the whole review: bernardvukas.com Creating XLLs with Add-in Express for Office and .netBy Dennis Wallentin, MVP, author of "Professional Excel Development"
This article is the first of a series of total three articles that will cover how to create XLL add-ins with Add-in Express 2010 for Office and .NET. With the tool we can also easily create solutions for managed COM Add-ins, managed Automation Add-ins, Smart Tags and Real Time Data (RTD) Servers. The RAD tool is fully integrated in VS.NET and it works well with the latest versions of VS.NET and of Excel, including the 64-bit version of Excel 2010. In this first article I will describe how we easily can create an XLL add-in with the RAD tool. The second article will discuss the deployment of the XLL add-in. The final article will set focus on the pros and cons of using a RAD tool like Add-in Express .NET 2010 for developing XLL add-ins. I hope the series will shed some light on how we can develop solutions with the RAD tool. Read the whole review: xldennis.wordpress.com Build a collapsible task pane in OutlookBy Ty Anderson, MVP, author of "Office 2003 Programming: Real World Applications"
I first discovered ADX when building a solution for one of the major banks in the USA. That project required that we integrate Outlook with a custom CRM solution involving Exchange, Oracle, and Java web services. Using ADX, I was able to quickly build out the required Outlook Task Panes. Add-in Express allows you to build custom CommandBars, Ribbons, Outlook Property Pages, Form Regions, and much much more. In fact, they extend the possibilities of such things like form regions, allow you to place them in other locations besides the bottom of an Outlook form... Read the whole review: officedeveloper.net Add-in Express for Office and VCL reviewsDeveloping Office add-ins the easy wayBy Fernando Madruga, Dephi developer, blogger
So, how does one create an Office Add-in the easy way? Well, you cheat! :) Actually, it's no more cheating than using database access components to access a, (you guessed!) database... I've been using AfalinaSoft's Add-in Express components in the last 18 months or so, and all I can say is that it's child's play doing any office Add-In development, be that Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Visio, etc... I've created some Excel add-ins for my own use just because it was so easy to do them, rather than coding in VBScript! Outlook is very well represented in this lot with very cool features available for it as you'll see later in this post. Some new features added in the 2007 version allow you to add new form regions allowing you to create some great outlook add-ins with very little effort! (Note: that's 2007 version of the components, not of Office! All the features and the tutorial in the next part work the same from Office 2000 to 2007!) Read the whole review: memyselfanddelphiblogspot.com Add-in Express for Internet Explorer reviewsCreating a simple Internet Explorer add-in that interacts with the HTML events and content of the current documentBy Peter Holpar, MVP, blogger
Since unfortunately there is no out-of-the-box tool in Visual Studio that would make creation of IE add-ins easier, one should either create the add-in using C++ or get a free or commercial wrapper to work with managed code. For my example I chose a commercial product, Add-in Express for Internet Explorer because it provides all of the features I need in a very convenient way. You can find some introductory and more advanced texts, how-to articles and tutorials about the product on their site as well. In this post I will show you a simple example for Internet Explorer add-in that interacts with the content and events of the browser. For the sake of the sample I chose two features you might be familiar with from Google Toolbar... Read the whole review: pholpar.wordpress.com Creating an add-on for Internet Explorer with Add-in ExpressBy Justin Braun, developer, blogger
For some time I have had a few ideas for Internet Explorer add-ons that I'd like to create. One of the biggest challenges was with creating the wrapper that is required to encapsulate the executing code. You could create context menu actions pretty easily through the registry, but you were limited to what you could do via JavaScript. That being said, I was doing some research to see how I could accomplish this. Almost immediately I came across Add-in Express which makes a product called Add-In Express for Internet Explorer. They have a number of products available that help build add-ons around Microsoft Office and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Add-In Express has made the process of developing add-ons for Internet Explorer so simple. A developer can create an add-on in little time with minimal development as it pertains to the wrapper. As a point of reference, from start to functional, it took me about 2 hours to create my Instapaper add-on. Put your time and thought into your applied code, let Add-in Express handle the integration. Read the whole review: justinbraun.com Creating an IE plug-inBy Joacim Andersson, MVP, developer, blogger
I was recently approached by a customer about an intriguing project, unfortunately I can't tell you too much about it since I'm under an NDA, but it involved creating an add-in for Internet Explorer and a custom Windows Service which would act as the backend.I found two different frameworks that I started evaluating. The first is an open source project originally created by Microsoft called SpicIE and the second is a commercial product called Add-In-Express for Internet Explorer. In my case I needed to be able to create a toolbar button and an IE bar, which are those side panes similar to how Favorites and History are displayed within IE. There was no problem creating these in either framework but the Add-In-Express also had an Advanced IE Bar control with some additional features which I liked a lot. They also have visual designers which simplified everything and I was able to create a stub application, that demonstrated the final design, within a few minutes. Read the whole review: msmvps.com Add-in Express - a great tool for tiny priceBy Przemyslaw Bielicki, Software Engineer, blogger
With this tool I achieved more in 5 minutes than with Microsoft and opensource documentation in two days. It's not an exaggeration if I say that every developer is able to create at least working skeleton of IE plugin in 15 minutes. Add-in Express for IE has excellent documentation and is extremely easy to use. ROI is obvious and very quick as this tool gives a great quality for the price it costs. With Add-in Express for IE templates for Visual Studio you not only create plugins in 5 minutes. This tool also creates the whole project structure as well as the Setup project that enables your users installing the plugins in the user-friendly manner. And it takes only few clicks! I love it. Read the whole review: blog.bielu.com Ribbon Designer for SharePoint and Office 365 reviewsCustomizing SharePoint ribbon using a designer toolBy Peter Holpar, MVP, blogger
With installing the Ribbon Designer for SharePoint and Office 365 you get a Visual Studio project and item template to extend and boost your SharePoint solutions. In the past months I spent several hours playing with this tool and found its features can help the everyday life of a SharePoint designer / developer. If you consider to do significant amount of SharePoint ribbon customization, or you are a newcomer on this field of development, and would like to do the job quickly without understanding first all the bells and whistles of the ribbon customization features, you should definitely consider this tool as an option. Read the whole review: pholpar.wordpress.com |
