Entries tagged with vsto - Channel 9

Copying a Document to the End User Computer after a ClickOnce Installation

Kathleen McGrath — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 21:15:00 GMT

In this interview, programming writer Mary Lee demonstrates how to deploy an Office solution and implement a post-deployment action that copies a document to the end user's desktop. You can learn more in the topic Walkthrough: Copying a Document to the End User Computer after a ClickOnce Installation.

Kathleen McGrath
Visual Studio User Education
http://blogs.msdn.com/kathleen

VSTO: How to Add a Button into the Office Ribbon

Jennifer Marsman — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 17:33:00 GMT

Jennifer Marsman demonstrates how to add a button into the Office Ribbon using the Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO).

NOTE: the VSTO Power Tools, which were shown briefly, can be downloaded from here.

Publishing an Office add-in to a SharePoint Site for Distribution

John Wiese — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:10:00 GMT

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.

So, how do you publish your add-in to a SharePoint site? Well, if you watch this short five and half minute video you will get the skinny on how to do just that. There are a few basic steps that need to be done in order to accompllish this that I will walk you through in the video, enjoy!

Tool Shed Tooltip #7: VSTO from Episode 1

Russell Fustino — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:59:00 GMT

It makes sense if users in your organization are using Office 2007 or 2003 to consider building your application on top of one of the many office products. Learn how in this video.

What is it?
Visual Studio Tools for Office is the premiere development tool for building Office Business Applications.

Download Site: included with VS 2008 Pro at msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio

Example Problem(s) it solves:
You want to automate a task in Excel for budget info that stores info to a DB and creates an email or Power Point from it automatically
Enhance Word s ribbon with your own companies customized set of tools.

Installation Notes: You need to have office 2007 installed on your development machine. Trial is available.

This clip is Russ' Tool Shed Tooltip #7, the seventh and final of the clips from Episode One of the TV Show, Russ' Tool Shed presents... It's All About The Tools hosted by Russ Fustino and Co-Host Stan Schultes. Download code, ppt and demo script from http://code.msdn.com/toolshed for all episodes. Also, use the links on http://channel9.msdn.com/toolshed to download tools. Finally, check out some more great videos on the Developer Evangelist East site: http://channel9.msdn.com/dpeeast

VSTO: The Basics

Jennifer Marsman — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 16:29:00 GMT

Jennifer Marsman gives an introduction to Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) with simple coding demos that illustrate how to utilize Windows Forms controls in Office documents, execute code when a value in a spreadsheet changes, read and write data to a spreadsheet, and create a document action pane.

Deploying Multiple Office Solutions in a Single ClickOnce Installer

Kathleen McGrath — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 01:31:00 GMT

In this interview Mary Lee, a programming writer on the Visual Studio User Education team, describes the topic Walkthrough: Deploying Multiple Office Solutions in a Single ClickOnce Installer and demonstrates how you can deploy multiple Office solutions in a single package to simplify the installation and update process.

Kathleen McGrath
Visual Studio User Education

Re-signing ClickOnce Application and Deployment Manifests with MAGE

Beth Massi — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 15:12:00 GMT

In this interview I sit down again with Saurabh Bhatia, a Program Manager on the Office Client team, who is responsible for the ClickOnce publishing functionality in Visual Studio. We chat about trust issues and certificates and he sets me straight on how ClickOnce deployment and application manifests work. He then shows how to re-sign them outside of Visual Studio using a tool called Mage. This is really handy for folks that need to modify the files within a deployment package, like the application settings (app.config) file, but don't have Visual Studio installed.

Saurabh draws on the whiteboard in this one and since I'm a one (wo)man show I couldn't jump up and zoom in so I redrew it for you all here.

Saurabh has also posted more details in an article he wrote here.

Links from the show:

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

Show: It’s All About The Tools – TV Show, Episode One

Brian Johnson — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:54:00 GMT

Have you ever felt inundated with developer tools? Do you ever feel you're missing something that could make your life easier as a developer and a power user?

There are so many tools available to choose from and it keeps getting tougher to keep up with them. Tool familiarity continues to be one of the top developer challenges. This series of seminars is all about tools for developers, by developers. Join Microsoft Florida Developer Evangelist Russ Fustino & Microsoft MVP Stan Schultes and others as they bring you demos and discussion about their favorite developer tools.

In this video, you will find tools to help solve these common developer challenges…

Building and deploying video capability in websites
Integrating Mapping Services
Managing your development machine
What’s exactly in those messages in your service layer?
Need storage that’s accessible from anywhere?
Create beautifully styled WPF applications with no lines of code (and no design team!)
Easily Developing Office Business Applications

(When viewing in Silverlight, the dots on the timeline correspond to the scenes listed below.)

Tool Shed Theme Song
Introduction
Demo 1 – Silverlight Live Plug-in for Expression Encoder
Demo 2 – Live Services – Virtual Earth
Demo 3 – SysInternals
Demo 4 – Fiddler
Demo 5 – Windows Live Sky Drive
Demo 6 – WPF Application Styling by guest speaker Jason Beres of Infragistics
Demo 7 – Visual Studio Tools for Office
Developer Community Update by Joe Healy

Special thanks to co-host Stan Schultes, Jason Beres of Infragistics, Carl Franklin, DeVry University Miramar, Joe Healy, the South Florida Code Camp Team and Attendees, and the many volunteers who made this show a reality!

Special notes:

To use the Infragistics WPF Application Styling download, install the NetAdvantage Win Client and then install the Styling CTP
Listen to Dot Net Rocks on March 26 for aninterview with Russ and Stan on filming of this show along with some exciting presentation tips and tricks.

Blog: It's All About The Tools TV Show - World Premiere to be posted on Thursday, March 19

Russell Fustino — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 16:54:00 GMT

Are you one of over 100,000 developers who has seen a MSDN Russ' Tool Shed Event over the past 10 years? If not, now is your chance. Microsoft's Russ Fustino has captured an exciting new format for the event. It is a TV Show; including a co-host, MVP Stan Schultes, Guest Speaker from Infragistics, Jason Beres and Microsoft Developer Evangelist Joe Healy doing a developer community wrapup. We filmed this in front of a live studio audience at the South Florida Code Camp a few weeks back and it is ready to be published. Come back to this page on Thursday at approximately 11am EST for the World Premiere of a tool focused show call It's All About The Tools - TV Show, Episode One. Knowing the right developer tool for the job at hand is more important than ever, and that is what this show is all about... tools. Come back on Thursday to be entertained, enlightened and educated.

Adding Tabs to a TabSet in Office 2007 Apps

John Wiese — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:47:00 GMT

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.

You can add your own tabs to these tab sets, or add groups to a tab within the tab set, this video will show you how.

How to Send Just a few Slides from PowerPoint as an Email Attachment

John Wiese — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

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 Microsoft too, at least I thought it was. And given the internal responses I've received from around the world to my new add-in, I wasn't too far off.

So, I thought I'd share the "how-to" with everyone else. Enjoy!

Adding Search to Outlook Context Menus

John Wiese — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 21:55:00 GMT

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.

Outlook Context Menus and Creating a Meeting from an Email

John Wiese — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 21:12:00 GMT

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?

Well, in this screencast I'll show you how to add to the context menu and generate a meeting request that includes the email's recipients, subject and body in the meeting details.

In the talk I reference the OutlookItem.cs class, details of which you can find here: http://tinyurl.com/4g7x64

WCF and AIF in Dynamics 2009: Chatting with Michael Merz

Ben Riga — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 23:56:00 GMT

In this video I’m back on the Advanta campus chatting with Michael Merz, Program Manager for Application Integration Framework (AIF) on the Dynamics AX team.

AIF is a standards-based framework that allows you to publish and consume web services. It’s used primarily in integration scenarios when connecting Dynamics AX with other systems. AX also has .NET Business Connector (BC.NET) for integrating with .NET applications. BC.NET is more for client side integration. AIF is all about web services and is completely standards-based. Under the covers AIF takes full advantage of .NET using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). For more complex integration scenarios AIF can also help expose services using MSMQ and BizTalk.

With Dynamics AX 2009, the team ships a bunch of services (about 60 out of the box) that are ready for use. That includes, for example, the more common scenarios like integration with sales orders or customers. AIF allows you to create, read, update and delete those sales orders while maintaining the integrity of the database (i.e. without directly touching the database at all). This is done independent of the transport so when developing you could begin by updating via http and later switch to MSMQ. This can be as simple as enabling the service then “generating” which generates the WCF interface (i.e. WSDL). That web service is then available to be consumed by any standards-based client (including apps written in php, java and naturally any of the languages in Visual Studio). You can also configure the service endpoints to change the binding or authentication parameters.

In the video, Michael walks us through using a standard Excel Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) project to consume a AX 2009 sales order service that is exposed using AIF. He also shows us how, by using WS-Addressing in the WCF headers, you can pass a target company for a web service call. By default, AX limits error messages coming back from the server for security reasons. Michael shows us how to configure AX to propagate those errors when you need to see them.

Dynamics AX is a rich platform for supply chain management and financials. AIF opens up AX so that ISVs can build on that richness by integrating their own applications. Sometimes when you do that you need to consume a web service exposed by external applications. We see here how you can plug external web services into the AX processes. In this case, Michael shows us how when trying to create a customer in Dynamics AX with a name that has been blacklisted by the US government (“Bin Laden”, for instance. Yikes! :) ) the customer create process calls out to an external web service in the cloud to verify the customer name. This seamless integration of external processes is a boon for ISVs that need those deep integration points. Michael explains how. In order to do this sort of integration you build a Service Reference in the Application Object Tree (AOT) to provide the parameters. AX takes care of much of work by generating the artifacts (compilation, deploying, bundling etc) that are deployed and executed on the server. CLR interop is available in order to use .NET DLLs and their classes.

Some code samples are available here:

Application Integration Framework Overview (MSDN)
Calling the Customer and Vendor Services (Dianne Siebold)

Word Add-ins Part 3: Searching for Text Strings and Adding Comments

Harry Miller — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 21:57:00 GMT

You can search the text in any open Microsoft Office Word document for specific strings if you put the code in a VSTO application-level add-in. When you find an instance of the string, you can perform some action on it. This video shows how to flag the string with a comment that contains text passed in from a calling method.

Word Add-ins Part 2: When Add-ins Collide

Harry Miller — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:49:00 GMT

When you build a VSTO add-in project, it installs the add-in on your development computer. Even if you close that project and start another, or even close Visual Studio entirely, all add-ins you have built will still run when you start the Office application on that computer. If you're not expecting the add-in to run, you might be surprized by what you see the next time you open the application or test a new project. This video shows how to easily uninstall add-ins from your development computer after you build them if you don't want them to run any more.

Word Add-ins Part 1: Clear the Ribbon Except for My Controls

Harry Miller — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 01:40:00 GMT

You can use VSTO to easily customize the Ribbon to show only the controls you want to display. This video shows how to clear the Ribbon in Microsoft Office Word so it contains only a single button. The button inserts a graphic into the open Word document at the cursor location. Why? Well, really it's just to demo the Ribbon thing. But some day you might want to insert images into a document too, who knows?

New Features for Visual Studio 2008 Office Projects in SP1

Beth Massi — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 19:49:00 GMT

In this interview, Kris Makey, a Developer on the Office Client team, shows us a couple new features of Office projects in Visual Studio 2008 SP1. First he demonstrates a new error logging feature that will log any end-user install errors to the Event Log making it much easier to tell what went wrong. He also shows us how you can place Winforms controls directly on document surfaces.

For more information on Office Development with Visual Studio visit the developer portal http://msdn.com/vsto and the team blog http://blogs.msdn.com/vsto/.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

Activating a Custom Tab on the Ribbon When a Document Is Opened

Harry Miller — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:34:00 GMT

A lot of people seem to want to make a certain tab or control on the Ribbon active programmatically using VSTO. It makes sense that a developer would want to select the custom tab if the controls that are most useful for the current document are all on that tab. This video goes in-depth about this programming question.

OK, not really. The video just says you can't do it, because the Ribbon is designed with the idea of leaving the user in control of the UI -- no surprise selection changes. But you should watch the video anyway. It's really short, and, you know, kinda funny.

Turn Off Automatic Conversion of Office 2003 Projects into 2007 Projects

Harry Miller — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 15:28:00 GMT

In Visual Studio 2008, when you open a Microsoft Office 2003 project, by default it starts the project migration wizard if you have the 2007 Microsoft Office system installed on your development computer. In other words, Visual Studio automatically tries to upgrade older VSTO projects to the version of Office that you have installed.

If you need to maintain the 2003 version of the project, you can turn off this default setting.

Create an Excel Shortcut Menu That Writes Selections to a Text File

Harry Miller — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 00:25:00 GMT

It doesn't take much code to add a command to a shortcut menu in Excel, but the menu objects have strange names so it's not intuitive, to me at least. The trickiest part is just sorting out how it's supposed to work, because it seems like it should be different from adding buttons to toolbars, but it really looks like that's what you're doing.

The code is all posted in this post on the VSTO team blog.

Thanks to McLean Schofield, programmer/writer and 3-star forum answer person, for this code example!

Creating an OBA - Word Add-in for CRM

Girish Raja — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 23:41:00 GMT

In this screencast, we'll see how to create a simple OBA application (word add-in) that pulls data from Dynamics CRM 4.0.

Check out http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/benriga/The-Dynamics-Duo-talk-about-CRM-and-Office-Business-Applications-OBA/ for some of the possibilities with such applications.

Check out http://blogs.msdn.com/girishr/ for code samples and related screencasts.

The Dynamics Duo talk about CRM and Office Business Applications (OBA)

Ben Riga — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 23:11:00 GMT

In the last episode we talked about Microsoft Office SharePoint Server; in this one we talk about Microsoft Office on the client side.

CRM actually integrates really really well with Microsoft Office Outlook right out of the box. That’s a natural as it’s the place where many people work day-in day-out (and especially those sales and marketing folks). But what about those people that need that data in Word or Excel? In this episode we talk about how easy it is to customize the integration of Dynamics CRM with Microsoft Office on the client side. This category of applications, often referred to as Office Business Applications (OBA), help to unlock the value of line-of-business (LOB) systems, such as the ones built on the Dynamics CRM platform, and turn document-based processes into real applications. There’s lots more info about these types of apps over at OBA Central.

In the demo Girish put together, we see how the app is surfaced with a custom ribbon. This in turn opens a Status Report template which has a custom task pane. That task pane pulls all the relevant information for my status report from the CRM server (in our case CRM Online). It authenticates and then grabs the project info. When I choose a Project it also pulls in the work items for that project. Just like with the SharePoint example, it’s trivial to open a CRM form right from within Word where I review more detailed info or even start an Office Communicator session with the owner of the work item.

I can then insert the work items along with descriptions and hours worked directly into the status report. Since you’ll want to share that status report with your customer, Girish built in the ability to publish it to Office Live Small Business. Office Live is the ideal place for sharing documents with customers or partners who won’t have access to SharePoint sites behind your firewall (and it’s free!).

The secret sauce that allows these kinds of apps to be developed so quickly is right in Visual Studio in the form of Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO). As you might expect, the same authentication code we used in the SharePoint example is used for authentication from with the OBA. Then it’s just a case of using the Dynamics CRM web services to pull info from CRM and post it into the Word doc. Nice!

LINQ to DASL: Changing Appointments with C# and LINQ

John Wiese — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 22:17:00 GMT

A few weeks back, shortly after the release of the Visual Studio Tools for Office Power Tools, I did an overview screencast to let you know a little about the different tools. In this screencast I wanted to show a cool little sample of how you might use LINQ to DASL to modify appointments in your calendar in batch instead of by hand. If you don't already have the VSTO Power Tools you can get them here.

Embedding Multimedia-Rich Content onto Office Documents

Dan Fernandez — Mon, 05 May 2008 19:22:13 GMT

This screencast shows how you can combine a set of Microsoft applications/tools and technologies to author, develop and host media content that can be embedded into any Microsoft Office document supporting VSTO.

We use Expression to author the media, Silverlight Streaming for hosting and streaming the media content, Visual Studio and VSTO to develop the hosting Office document for embedding the media content.

The theme is around creating user/instruction manuals with enhanced media content to increase user experience.