Entries tagged with visual studio tools for office - Channel 9

Water Cooler Interview with Doug Ware and Brendon Schwartz

Kirk Evans — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 13:55:00 GMT

In our first episode of The Water Cooler show, host Kirk Evans interviews Doug Ware and Brendon Schwartz. We discuss the question, "Does every SharePoint installation require a developer?"

Watch for more episodes on The Water Cooler show!

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

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.

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!