Visual Studio Tools for Office 2007: VSTO for Excel, Word, and Outlook [Paperback]

“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.

C# and Visual Basic .NET Code samples for download can be found here: http://www.informit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0321533216