Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005; The First of Many Posts, I Hope
I've recently been asked to present a session at Tech-Ed 2005 on one of my favorite topics--developing .NET solutions for Office, and spent the day digging into VSTO 2005. Here are the details on the session:
CLI361 Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the Office System: Building Office Solutions Using Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office
Track(s): Architecture, Smart Client Development
Day/Time: Wednesday, June 8 3:45 PM - 5:00 PM Room: S 220 E
Incorporating Office capabilities into applications using the Word and Excel object models is often a challenge for .NET developers. Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the Microsoft Office System now provides Host controls that allow developers to use some native Word 2003 and Excel 2003 objects as standard .NET controls. In this session, we look at how you can incorporate databinding, the new Actions Pane control and smart tags into your Microsoft Office solutions. We then build on these concepts to demonstrate how Host controls enable you to create Microsoft Office smart client applications quickly and easily.
I'll post more on VSTO 2005 as I dig more into it, but it's a great solution for building Office 2003 solutions using managed code. Although VSTO 2003 was cool enough, the 2005 version adds so many new features that it's worth investigating, if you haven't already. If you want some walkthroughs to get you started with VSTO 2005, try these links: