Visual Studio Tools for Office: Using Visual Basic 2005 with Excel, Word, Outlook, and InfoPath

Description

“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

“This book covers in a clear and concise way all of the ins and outs of programming with Visual Studio Tools for Office. Given the authors’ exhaustive experiences with this subject, you can’t get a more authoritative description of VSTO than this book!”
—Paul Vick, technical lead, Visual Basic .NET, Microsoft Corporation

“Eric and Eric 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, InfoPath, and Outlook solutions.”
—Vernon W. Hui, test lead, Microsoft Corporation

“This book is an in-depth, expert, and definitive guide to programming using Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005. 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 2003 using VSTO 2005,’ but until you see something like the example at the start of Chapter 15, 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 2003.”
—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 2005. The depth of their knowledge and understanding of VSTO and Office is evident in this book. Professional developers architecting enterprise solutions using VSTO 2005 and Office System 2003 now have a new weapon in their technical arsenal.”
—Paul Stubbs, program manager, 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

Visual Studio Tools for Office is both the first and the definitive book on VSTO 2005 programming, written by the inventors of the technology. VSTO is a set of tools that allows professional developers to use the full power of Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework to put code behind Excel 2003, Word 2003, Outlook 2003, and InfoPath 2003.

VSTO provides functionality never before available to the Office developer: data binding and data/view separation, design-time views of Excel and Word documents inside Visual Studio, rich support for Windows Forms controls in a document, the ability to create custom Office task panes, server-side programming support against Office, and much more.

Carter and Lippert cover their subject matter with deft insight into the needs of .NET developers learning VSTO. This book

• Explains the architecture of Microsoft Office programming and introduces the object models
• Teaches the three basic patterns of Office solutions: Office automation executables, Office add-ins, and code behind a document
• Explores the ways of customizing Excel, Word, Outlook, and InfoPath, and plumbs the depths of programming with their events and object models
• Introduces the VSTO programming model
• Teaches how to use Windows Forms in VSTO and how to work with the Actions Pane
• Delves into VSTO data programming and server data scenarios
• Explores .NET code security and VSTO deployment

Advanced material covers working with XML in Word and Excel, developing COM add-ins for Word and Excel, and creating Outlook add-ins with VSTO.

The complete code samples are available on the book’s Web page.

Sample Content

Table of Contents

Figures xxxi

Tables xlv

Foreword xlix

Preface liii

Acknowledgments lvii

About the Authors lix

Part I: An Introduction to VSTO 1

Chapter 1: An Introduction to Office Programming 3

Why Office Programming? 3

Office Object Models 6

Properties, Methods, and Events 12

The Office Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs) 34

Conclusion 43

Chapter 2: Introduction to Office Solutions 45

The Three Basic Patterns of Office Solutions 45

Office Automation Executables 49

Office Add-Ins 60

Code Behind a Document 65

Conclusion 72

Part II: Office Programming in .NET 73

Chapter 3: Programming Excel 75

Ways to Customize Excel 75

Programming User-Defined Functions 83

Introduction to the Excel Object Model 92

Conclusion 98

Chapter 4: Working with Excel Events 99

Events in the Excel Object Model 99

Events in Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office 138

Conclusion 142

Chapter 5: Working with Excel Objects 143

Working with the Application Object 143

Working with the Workbooks Collection 157

Working with the Workbook Object 161

Working with the Worksheets, Charts, and Sheets Collections 169

Working with Document Properties 172

Working with the Windows Collections 175

Working with the Window Object 179

Working with the Names Collection and Name Object 181

Working with the Worksheet Object 183

Working with the Range Object 197

Special Excel Issues 213

Conclusion 220

Chapter 6: Programming Word 223

Ways to Customize Word 223

Programming Research Services 229

Introduction to the Word Object Model 237

Conclusion 238

Chapter 7: Working with Word Events 243

Events in the Word Object Model 243

Why Are There Multiple Application and Document Event Interfaces? 244

Events in Visual Studio Tools for Office 273

Conclusion 275

Chapter 8: Working with Word Objects 277

Working with the Application Object 277

Working with the Dialog Object 299

Working with Windows 304

Working with Templates 307

Working with Documents 310

Working with a Document 315

Working with the Range Object 335

Working with Bookmarks 358

Working with Tables 360

Conclusion 362

Chapter 9: Programming Outlook 363

Ways to Customize Outlook 363

Custom Property Pages 370

Introduction to the Outlook Object Model 378

Introduction to the Collaboration Data Objects 382

Conclusion 386

Chapter 10: Working with Outlook Events 387

Events in the Outlook Object Model 387

Application-Level Events 392

Outlook Item Events 405

Other Events 419

Conclusion 422

Chapter 11: Working with Outlook Objects 423

Working with the Application Object 423

Working with the Explorers and Inspectors Collections 431

Working with the Explorer Object 433

Working with the Inspector Object 440

Working with the NameSpace Object 443

Working with the MAPIFolder Object 450

Working with the Items Collection 459

Properties and Methods Common to Outlook Items 466

Outlook Issues 486

Conclusion 492

Chapter 12: Introduction to InfoPath 493

What Is InfoPath? 493

Getting Started 494

Form Security 499

Programming InfoPath 505

Data Source Events 509

Form Events, Properties, and Methods 518

Conclusion 529

Part III: Office Programming in VSTO 531

Chapter 13: The VSTO Programming Model 533

The VSTO Programming Model 533

VSTO Extensions to Word and Excel Objects 536

Dynamic Controls 542

Inspecting the Generated Code 549

VSTO Extensions to the Word and Excel Object Models 555

Conclusion 569

Chapter 14: Using Windows Forms in VSTO 571

Introduction 571

Adding Windows Forms Controls to Your Document 577

Writing Code Behind a Control 584

The Windows Forms Control Hosting Architecture 585

Properties Merged from OLEObject or OLEControl 594

Adding Controls at Runtime 597

Conclusion 605

Chapter 15: Working with the Actions Pane 607

Introduction to the Actions Pane 607

Working with the ActionsPane Control 613

Conclusion 628

Chapter 16: Working with Smart Tags in VSTO 629

Introduction to Smart Tags 629

Creating Document-Level Smart Tags with VSTO 633

Creating Application-Level Smart Tags 647

Conclusion 672

Chapter 17: VSTO Data Programming 673

Creating a Data-Bound Customized Spreadsheet with VSTO 673

Creating a Data-Bound Customized Word Document with VSTO 681

Datasets, Adapters, and Sources 682

Another Technique for Creating Data-Bound Spreadsheets 691

Caching Data in the Data Island 699

Advanced ADO.NET Data Binding: Looking Behind the Scenes 704

Binding-Related Extensions to Host Items and Host Controls 705

Conclusion 712

Chapter 18: Server Data Scenarios 713

Populating a Document with Data on the Server 713

Using ServerDocument and ASP.NET 716

A Handy Client-Side ServerDocument Utility 724

The ServerDocument Object Model 726

Conclusion 737

Chapter 19: .NET Code Security 739

Code-Access Security Versus Role-Based Security 740

Code-Access Security in .NET 741

Location, Location, Location 749

Strong Names 753

Publisher Certificates 761

Trusting the Document 765

Deploying Policy to User Machines 769

Conclusion 773

Chapter 20: Deployment 775

VSTO Prerequisites 776

Deploying to an Intranet Shared Directory or Web Site 777

Local Machine Deployment Without a Deployment Manifest 785

Editing Manifests 787

Creating Setup Packages 793

Conclusion 805

Part IV: Advanced Office Programming 807

Chapter 21: Working with XML in Excel 809

Introduction to Excel’s XML Features 809

Introduction to XML Schema Creation in Visual Studio 811

An End-to-End Scenario 816

Advanced XML Features in Excel 826

Excel-Friendly XML Schemas 830

VSTO Support for Excel Schema Mapping 833

Conclusion 849

Chapter 22: Working with XML in Word 851

Introduction to Word’s XML Features 851

An End-to-End Scenario: Creating a Schema and Mapping It into a Word Document 855

Exporting the Mapped XML in the Document to an XML Data File 869

Importing an XML Data File into the Mapped Document 871

The XML Options Dialog Box 877

VSTO Support for Word Schema Mapping 880

VSTO Support for the WordML File Format 888

Conclusion 889

Chapter 23: Developing COM Add-Ins for Word and Excel 891

Introduction to Add-Ins 891

Scenarios for Using Add-Ins 892

How a COM Add-In Is Registered 893

Implementing IDTExtensibility2 897

Writing a COM Add-In Using Visual Studio 904

The Pitfalls of mscoree.dll 914

COM Interop and regasm.exe 914

Shimming: A Solution to the Problems with mscoree.dll 919

Conclusion 920

Chapter 24: Creating Outlook Add-Ins with VSTO 921

Moving Away from COM Add-Ins 921

Creating an Outlook Add-In in VSTO 933

Conclusion 940

Bibliography 941

Index 943

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