| OverviewThis is the Safari online edition of the printed book.
Visual Studio Tools for Office 2007:
VSTO for Excel, Word, and Outlook is the definitive book on
VSTO 2008 programming, written by the inventors of the technology.
VSTO is a set of tools that allow professional developers to use
the full power of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET
Framework to program against Microsoft Office 2007.
This book delivers in one place all the
information you need to succeed using VSTO to program against Word
2007, Excel 2007, and Outlook 2007, and provides the necessary
background to customize Visio 2007, Publisher 2007, PowerPoint
2007, and InfoPath 2007. It introduces the Office 2007 object
models, covers the most commonly used objects in those object
models, and will help you avoid the pitfalls caused by the COM
origins of the Office object models. Developers who wish to program
against Office 2003 should consult Carter and Lippert's
previous book, Visual Studio Tools for Office.
In VSTO 2008, you can build add-ins for all
the major Office 2007 applications, build application-level custom
task panes, customize the new Office Ribbon, modify Outlook's
user interface using Forms Regions, and easily deploy everything
you build using ClickOnce.
Carter and Lippert cover their subject
matter with deft insight into the needs of .NET developers learning
VSTO, based on the deep knowledge that comes from the
authors' unique perspective of living and breathing VSTO for
the past three years. This book
Explains the architecture of Microsoft
Office programming and introduces the object models
Covers the main ways Office applications
are customized and extended
Explores the ways of customizing Excel,
Word, and Outlook, and plumbs the depths of programming with their
events and object models
Introduces the VSTO programming
model
Teaches how to use Windows Forms and WPF
in VSTO and how to work with the Document Actions Pane and
application-level task panes
Delves into VSTO data programming and
server data scenarios
Teaches ClickOnce VSTO deployment
This is the one book you need to succeed in
programming against Office 2007. Editorial ReviewsProduct Description Praise for Visual Studio Tools for Office 2007 “Visual Studio Tools for Office has always been one of my favorite technologies to come out of Microsoft. There are millions of people who use Office applications all day, every day; with VSTO, you can create applications for them. Eric Carter and Eric Lippert helped create VSTO, so they know as much about it as anybody, making this book a must-have. After reading it, you’ll know everything needed to begin building solutions that take advantage of the .NET Framework features, in the UI your users are familiar with.” –Robert Green, senior consultant, MCW Technologies “With the application development community so focused on the Smart Client revolution, a book that covers VSTO from A to Z is both important and necessary. This book lives up to big expectations. It is thorough, has tons of example code, and covers Office programming in general terms–topics that can be foreign to the seasoned .NET developer who has focused on ASP.NET applications for years. Congratulations to Eric Lippert and Eric Carter for such a valuable work!” –Tim Huckaby, CEO, InterKnowlogy; Microsoft Regional Director “Eric Carter and Eric Lippert really get it. Professional programmers will love the rich power of Visual Studio and .NET, along with the ability to tap into Office programmability. This book walks you through programming Excel, Word, and Outlook solutions.” –Vernon W. Hui, test lead, Microsoft Corporation “This book is both a learning tool and a reference book, with a richness of tables containing object model objects and their properties, methods, and events. I would recommend it to anyone considering doing Office development using the .NET Framework; especially people interested in VSTO programming.” –Rufus Littlefield, software design engineer/tester, Microsoft Corporation “This book will help Office .NET Developers optimize their work. It goes beyond providing an introduction to VSTO and the object models of Word, Excel, and Outlook. The overview of other technologies available for interacting with Office assist in analyzing how to best approach any Office project. In addition, the authors’ insights into the design of this RAD tool make it possible to get the most out of VSTO applications.” –Cindy Meister, Microsoft MVP for VSTO, author of Word Programmierung, Das Handbuch “This book is an in-depth, expert, and definitive guide to programming using Visual Studio Tools for Office 2007. It is a must-have book for anyone doing Office development.” –Siew Moi Khor, programmer/writer, Microsoft Corporation “We don’t buy technical books for light reading, we buy them as a resource for developing a solution. This book is an excellent resource for someone getting started with Smart Client development. For example, it is common to hear a comment along the lines of, ‘It is easy to manipulate the Task Pane in Office 2007 using VSTO 2008,’ but until you see something like the example at the start of Chapter 14, it is hard to put ‘easy’ into perspective. “This is a thorough book that covers everything from calling Office applications from your application, to building applications that are Smart Documents. It allows the traditional Windows developer to really leverage the power of Office 2007.” –Bill Sheldon, principal engineer, InterKnowlogy; MVP “Eric Carter and Eric Lippert have been the driving force behind Office development and Visual Studio Tools for Office. The depth of their knowledge and understanding of VSTO and Office is evident in this book. Professional developers architecting enterprise solutions using VSTO 2008 and Office system 2007 now have a new weapon in their technical arsenal.” –Paul Stubbs, program manager, Microsoft Corporation “This book, also known as ‘The Bible of VSTO,’ has been rewritten for Office 2007 and I was delighted to read the sections on new VSTO features that were added in Visual Studio 2008. It explains how the VSTO team hid the plumbing and cumbersome coding tasks to allow you to be more productive and to just create excellent business applications. New or experienced in Office development, you will want to add this book to your library!” –Maarten van Stam, Microsoft MVP, Visual Developer, VSTO, http://blogs.officezealot.com/maarten “This book covers all of the ins and outs of programming with Visual Studio Tools for Office in a clear and concise way. Given the authors’ exhaustive experiences with this subject, you can’t get a more authoritative description of VSTO than this book!” –Paul Vick, principal architect, Microsoft Corporation Visual Studio Tools for Office 2007: VSTO for Excel, Word, and Outlook is the definitive book on VSTO 2008 programming, written by the inventors of the technology. VSTO is a set of tools that allows professional developers to use the full power of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework to program against Microsoft Office 2007. This book delivers in one place all the information you need to succeed using VSTO to program against Word 2007, Excel 2007, and Outlook 2007, and provides the necessary background to customize Visio 2007, Publisher 2007, and PowerPoint 2007. It introduces the Office 2007 object models, covers the most commonly used objects in those object models, and will help you avoid the pitfalls caused by the COM origins of the Office object models. Developers who wish to program against Office 2003 should consult Carter and Lippert’s previous book, Visual Studio Tools for Office. In VSTO 2008, you can build add-ins for all the major Office 2007 applications, build application-level custom task panes, customize the new Office Ribbon, modify Outlook’s user interface using Form Regions, and easily deploy everything you build using ClickOnce. Carter and Lippert cover their subject matter with deft insight into the needs of .NET developers learning VSTO, based on the deep knowledge that comes from the authors’ unique perspective of living and breathing VSTO for the past six years. This book -
Explains the architecture of Microsoft Office programming and introduces the object models -
Covers the main ways Office applications are customized and extended -
Explores the ways of customizing Excel, Word, and Outlook, and plumbs the depths of programming with their events and
object models -
Introduces the VSTO programming model -
Teaches how to use Windows Forms and WPF in VSTO and how to work with the Document Actions Pane and application-level task panes -
Delves into VSTO data programming and server data scenarios -
Teaches ClickOnce VSTO deployment This is the one book you need to succeed in programming against Office 2007. |
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Reader Reviews From Amazon (Ranked by 'Helpfulness') Average Customer Rating: based on 4 reviews. The best book I've found on .Net programming for Office, 2009-06-18 Reviewer rating: One of the problems with previous books about .Net programming for Office is that they tended to get bogged down discussing differences between versions of Office, differences between versions of Visual Studio Tools for Office, and differences betwee C# and VB.Net. This often left comparatively little room for thoughtful discussion of fundamental principles and advanced concepts.
In Visual Studio Tools for Office 2007: VSTO for Excel, Word, and Outlook, authors Eric Carter and Eric Lippert avoid this problem by focusing on one version of Office (2007), one version of VSTO (2008), and one language (C#). The result is a highly readable book that takes you from zero to sixty (to use some car lingo) in seconds flat.
Part I discusses the special challenges of using managed code to control still-COM-based Office applications. The nice thing about this discussion is that it gets all the bad news out of the way right in the beginning, and it helps you see that the bad news isn't all that bad, and in any case there's surprisingly little of it. After less than 90 pages, you feel very well grounded in the fundamentals of .Net-to-Office interoperability. The discussion of interfaces, delegates, and events on Pages 44-49 is so valuable that it justifies the price of the book all by itself. That discussion is followed by another incredibly valuable discussion of three types of Office solutions, which discussion truly sets the stage for the rest of the book.
And get this: The rest of the book keeps right on delivering value.
Part II provides three chapters apiece on Excel, Word, and Outlook.The first chapter on each application addresses special considerations when interoperating with that application. The second chapter covers events for that application, and the third covers that application's object model. I have never seen a more sensible and authoritative introduction to the Office application object models than those presented in this book.
Part III is devoted to topics specific to VSTO as a development toolset. This is where you'll find chapters on the VSTO programming model, using Windows forms and WPF in VSTO, working with document-level and application-level task panes, working with Outlook forms regions, working with the ribbon, working with Smart Tags, working with data, and deploying solutions with VSTO's new click-once deployment capability.
Some people will complain that this book has too narrow a focus, but I feel strongly that the focus is exactly right, and I say that as someone with a VB background. Anyone who has ever waded through a book that tries to cover every version of Office, every version of VSTO, and both VB.Net and C# knows that such an approach tries to satisfy everyone but ends up satisfying no one. This book has an integrity of vision and a quality of execution that helps you quickly grasp the broad outlines of the technology and then wade into the details as deeply as you care to go. It is the best book I've found on .Net programming for Office.
| Comprehensive, 2009-04-20 Reviewer rating: Very comprehensive introduction into the 'art of programming excel' and other office tools. Easy to follow, and lot's of examples. I would buy it again. | Awesome!!! Simply Awesome!!!!, 2009-03-26 Reviewer rating: This book is awesome. It covers everything you need to know to develop professional level VSTO applications with Visual Studio 2008.
I am glad this book was written using C# as a programming language. In the past VBA left a lot to be desired, enough so that I never took Office programming serious at all. When 2003 came out it sparked my interest, but I ran into enough pain right out of the box to drop it fast. This book has renewed my hope that I can start taking Office application seriously. By using C# the authors reaffirmed this is not VBA anymore. Had I browsed this book and found it to be written in VB.NET I would not have given Office 2007 VSTO another shot, because I would have thought the toolset was still lost in the VBA world.
For VB'ers... the authors do point out the differences in VB and C# where appropriate, they just do not provide code samples of each.
There are still a lot of traces of the crazy COM programming interfaces in the interops, but this book does a great job of pointing them out and shows you how to work with them. The "missing" and "ref missing" make the most elegant code look psychotic. It will be nice to have the C# 4.0 named and optional arguments feature to remedy the "missing" and "ref missing" messes.
The one complaint I have is about the code library that goes along with the book. There isn't one. The only thing made available is word documents that have the code listings from the Chapters cut and pasted from the book's manuscript.
All in all I do not think anyone developing VSTO should be without this book, and those that aren't developing VSTO should buy the book to educate themselves about the value the technology now provides. | Warning! This is a C# book - nothing on Visual Basic, 2009-03-18 Reviewer rating: Frankly I feel cheated. Their previous book, "Visual Studio Tools for Office" was based on Visual Studio 2005 and Office 2003. It was also focused on Visual Basic, which is what I was using. It was BY FAR the best book on the subject although. I program on VSTO 2008 and Office 2007 so I was really excited to see that they were coming out with "Visual Studio Tools for Office 2007" and pre-ordered it.
Surprise! This one only covers C#. There is absolutely nothing on the cover or the book description that tells you that. There isn't even anything in the book itself that tells you that except for part of a sentence in the Preface that mentions C# but doesn't mention Visual Basic.
If you're a C# programmer, this is probably a 5-star book for you. My complaint is that it should have been explicitly stated in the advertising that this one is C# only. The previous version mentioned Visual Basic on the cover so I knew it was what I wanted. Since this book had the same title and no mention of language, it never even occurred to me that this one has nothing about Visual Basic.
I'm sure I can find something useful if I dig through it so it's probably not worth the trouble of returning it. But for me this is a one-or-two-star book at best. |
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