International Developer Logo Last Updated 25.07.08 at 11.48
On Sale
This months front cover, click to see the table of contents.
Subscribe
 
REVIEWS

For Office Developers


  13.04.07

Digg! digg this story

del.icio.us Add to del.icio.us



“Visual Studio Tools for Office: Using Visual Basic 2005 with Excel, Word, Outlook, and InfoPath” has been written specifically for those developers who want to fully capitalise on Office development using managed code. The content of this largish book – over 1100 pages in length – has been divided into four major parts.

The opening part of the book provides an introduction to Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) by explaining Office object models and Office primary interop assemblies (PIAs), as well as showing developers how to use the functionality of Visual Studio to construct automation executables and add-ins.

The second part of the book examines, in detail, Office programming from a .NET perspective, while the next part focuses on Office programming in VSTO. Two examples of topics tackled in this part of the book are using Windows Forms in VSTO and working with Smart Tags in VSTO.

The fourth and final part of the book is dedicated to some of the more advanced Office programming concepts. It is here, for example, that developers can learn to fully exploit Word’s XML features.

Eric Carter and Eric Lippert, the authors of the book, argue that Office programming, using Office applications like Excel, Word, and so on, “represents an attractive platform on which to build solutions”.

Their reasoning, and I wholeheartedly agree with them, is that “you can customise and extend applications by developing solutions against their object models”. They add that, “by building a solution using the Office System, you can reuse some of the most feature rich and popular applications available”.::

 

Authors: Eric Carter and Eric Lippert

Format: Soft cover, 1120 pages

ISBN: 0321411757    Price: $US 49.99



Digg! digg this story

del.icio.us Add to del.icio.us





HAVE YOUR SAY
This article is rated  Rate this article