With WPF becoming more and more prevalent I thought it would be a good idea to revisit using WPF in office add-ins.   Way back when we launched Office 2007 one of the demo’s we did was an Outlook add-in that used a WPF control on an Outlook Form Region.  I’m not going to get that complex in this screencast, but I will show you how to host a simple WPF control on a WinForm and display that as a result of a Send event inside Outlook.    I hope all you WPF developers begin looking to Outlook as a…[more ]

I've been asked many times, "How do I publish my VSTO/Office Add-in installation files to a SharePoint site?".  It's relatively straight-forward to publish to a basic web site, or to a UNC file share, but SharePoint is a slightly different beast.…[more ]

Now that .NET 4 and VS 2010 are out, at least in Beta, I thought it would be a good time to show off some of the new features that are applicable to Office development.  In this second (see the first one here) screencast I will cover a new feature of Visual Studio 2010 for Office PIA (Primary Interop Assembly) references.  You can now Embed the needed referenc…[more ]

Now that .NET 4 and VS 2010 are out, at least in Beta, I thought it would be a good time to show off some of the new features that are applicable to Office development.  In this first screencast I will cover something new to C# specifically, optional paramters, as well as Lambda expressions.  [more ]

You may have noticed, say in Powerpoint, that when you click on a Chart that you've inserted there is a cool little grouping of tabs that happens.  You'll see that you get a "Chart Tools" tab set created in the title bar that shows you that the Design, Layout and Format tabs all apply to charts.  [more ]

Ever wanted to send someone just one or two slides from a PowerPoint deck?  Have you gone through the painful process of deleting all the slides you didn't want to send and then saving it as a new deck, then sending it?  Or maybe you've copied the ones you wanted and then pasted them into a new deck before sending?  Worse yet, did you copy them and past them directly into the email as images and thus make your email to big to send?  Ok, you get the picture.  This is a common occurence around…[more ]

Outlook 2007 added instant search, but why should you have to type in the same query over and over?  You shouldn't, so how about an add-in that adds your common searches to the context menu in Outlook.  In this screencast I'll show you how to add some simple searches to the context menu so you can access those searches when ever you like, without having to type them into the instant search box.[more ]

Would you like to add your own menu option to the context menu in Outlook?  How about turning an email into a new meeting request without having to type in all the attendees or the body and subject?  …[more ]

Use LINQ to DASL to query your calendar appointments, then perfom some code against the results.[more ]

The recently released VSTO Power Tools provide some great capabilities for Office developers.  The Extension Libraries alone could save you hours of work, and you can get then for free!  In this short video I will introduce you to a few of the main Power Tools in the package and briefly talk about a few of the other tools as well.  So sit back, enjoy, then start coding![more ]