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This is a truly RAD approach which will allow you to quickly design the Office UI elements your add-in requires and help you to focus on your add-in’s functionality rather than having to focus on getting “plumbing” code to work. Add-in Express make it easy to discover various features of Office by allowing you to add and design numerous UI elements visually by simply clicking on their respective icons on the visual designer toolbar. When you double-click on the AddinModule.cs file inside the Visual Studio Solution Explorer, it will open a visual design surface. The StartUp and Shutdown event handlers are already declared for you in the InternalStarup method: private void InternalStartup ( ) VSTO project architectureĪny VSTO project is centred on the ThisAddIn.cs class and the project layout is pretty straight forward.
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VSTO and Add-in Express differ greatly in the way they structure your Office extension project layout and how their architectures work. The wizard takes care of the infrastructure of creating your add-in, leaving you to focus on your application’s functionality. The wizard will also automatically sign your assembly using either the strong name file you’ve selected or the new one it created. The final step in the wizard allows you to either select an existing strong name file or to simply let it create one for you. Life could not be better! Signing the assembly You can support ALL of the Office applications and versions with a single project and codebase. For example, if you want to create an add-in using VSTO to support Microsoft Excel, Word and Outlook for Office 2007, 20 you would end up with six different projects – a nightmare to maintain!Īdd-in Express takes care of this for you. With VSTO if you want an add-in to share functionality between different Microsoft Office applications, you would need to create separate projects for each application. The next page of the new project wizard also makes something that would otherwise be impossible to accomplish with VSTO as easy as checking a few checkboxes – supporting several Office applications with one project. Truth is, you can’t really do this with VSTO without having to create separate projects for the different versions of Office or by jumping through a crazy amount of unsupported hoops.
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The real awesomeness of this feature can get lost if you do not compare it with how to accomplish version independence using VSTO. It will most likely also work in the next yet unreleased version of Office. NET Framework Common Language Runtime (CLR) to expose their functionality via. For example, if you choose Microsoft Office 2003 as the minimum supported version your add-in will work in all newer versions of Office from 2003 to Office 2013. Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) is a set of development tools available in the form of a Visual Studio add-in (project templates) and a runtime that allows Microsoft Office 2003 and later versions of Office applications to host the. Secondly, you get to choose which version of Office your add-in needs to support by choosing the minimum supported Office version. The first page of the wizard prompts you to choose the programming language you would like to use to develop your add-in. Multiple versions supported: Office 2013 – 2000 This wizard automates what otherwise would’ve taken hours to code manually using VSTO. All new Add-in Express projects start with the new project wizard.
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