Preface

Welcome to VSTO 3.0 for Office 2007 Programming. This book covers Visual Studio Tools for Office programming, with a primary emphasis on the several new VSTO programming features available for Microsoft Office 2007. VSTO is a phenomenon that means different things to different people. This book introduces developers to VSTO as a platform for developing enterprise solutions based on Microsoft Office application.

This book covers Microsoft VSTO objects for Microsoft Office applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, Outlook, and Project, which can be a significant challenge for the typical VBA developer—one set of target readers for this book. This book is focused more on the features of VSTO and how to work with the heavily-built Office object models. Although you might not be familiar with .NET programming, this book will help you to adapt easily to the new VSTO with .NET programming environment.

VSTO brings the Office applications to the .NET programming world. With VSTO 3.0, you can create add-ins for the six Microsoft Office applications, customize the Ribbon feature of the Microsoft Office 2007 suite, and create application-level custom task panes. This book strives to follow the same model. It explains VSTO’s concepts and basic programming in a way that helps beginners to get started and helps advanced users to get better. In addition to this, the book includes chapters for all of the Office applications, which describe how the programming and customization works, what its requirements are, and how it will simplify typical tasks.