Visual Studio Tools for Office: Using C# with Excel, Word, Outlook, and Infopath

Part of my 2006 professional goals involve learning more about Microsoft's collaboration software. To that end, I got a review copy of Eric Carter and Eric Lippert's book Visual Studio Tools for Office - Using C# with Excel, Word, Outlook, and InfoPath. Good stuff here... Contents: Part 1 - An Introduction to VSTO: An Introduction to Office Programming; Introduction to Office Solutions Part 2 - Office Programming in .NET: Programming in Excel; Working with Excel Events; Working with Excel Objects; Programming Word; Working with Word Events; Working with Word Objects; Programming Outlook; Working with Outlook Events; Working with Outlook Objects; Introduction to InfoPath Part 3 - Office Programming in VSTO: The VSTO Programming Model; Using Windows Forms in VSTO; Working with Action Pane; Working with Smart Tags in VSTO; VSTO Data Programming; Server Data Scenarios; .NET Code Security; Deployment Part 4 - Advanced Office Programming: Working with XML in Excel; Working with XML in Word; Developing COM Add-Ins for Word and Excel; Creating Outlook Add-Ins with VSTO Index The two Erics have put together a very nice volume that shows how the programmability of Office is structured, and then how that object model can be used within the Visual Studio environment using special tools provided for that purpose. While you have to have the latest and greatest Office and VS software to follow along, their writing style is pretty straight-forward, and the reader should be able to pick up on the core concepts to understand the possibilities inherent in the integration. Even if you're not necessarily ready to fire up VS to program Word or Excel, Part 1 and 2 do a great job in showing the object layout of those Office components and how they can be manipulated. If you've never gotten into the code that can be added to a Word or Excel document, those two parts of the book would be worth it alone. For me, I'm going to gain two benefits from this book. First, the object model information will help me better integrate Office into my Notes/Domino applications. I do some of that now, but the object model for Excel and Word have always been somewhat hazy to me. This book will help clarify those areas. Second, I think that knowing more about InfoPath will be part of my process as I seek to understand more about Microsoft collaboration application development. As a result, having this book should help me tie InfoPath into the Visual Studio environment and get a running start on my education. Definitely a useful addition to your library if this is an area of interest to you...

This book ties together two longstanding traits of Microsoft, that long predate C# or .NET. The first is its Office suite, which is one of its main moneyspinners. The second is its tradition, going back to the early 80s, if not earlier, for writing nice development tools for programmers. Undoubtedly, when Microsoft devised C#/.NET a few years ago, the abilities given in this book would have been a major goal. The book promises a synergy between C# and Office. The attraction is of course the huge user base for Office. To this ends, the book describes many ways to open up Office to programmatic control and customisation. The code examples don't even seem all that hard, conceptually. No doubt, they were well chosen for this reason. The size of the book reflects its natural division. There are sections that correspond to the components of Office- Excel, Word, Outlook. You can also see from the examples that there are groups of classes, in an object hierarchy that is very logically named so that you can easily get at the underlying data. For example, a worksheet under Excel is accessed as [naturally] Excel.Worksheet. Open source proponents might decry this further lockin of a developer into Microsoft's arms. But if you are willing to put up with that, it has to be said that Microsoft does provide a lot of support.

This is a solid walkthrough of building C# automation code for Office, and for writing code that integrates into Office. Excel is covered in depth. As are Word, Outlook and the fascinating new Infopath product that is an XML technologies client. The writing is good. I could have used a few more non-screenshot graphics to illustrate the control flow between applications. But these are nit-picks. This is a solid book on automating and integrating with office using C# and .NET framework.

When you see volume that huge (952 pages less the index), you are led into thinking that this is another documentation rehash. Well, this is not the case here. The book's size is well justified by the fact that they present the material with the least rehash possible and give realistic examples that are mostly usable without any modification or customization at all. Quite impressive, IMHO, is the fact that they take it really seriously and make the extra effort to write samples that properly follow coding conventions and style. It is quite sad and disappointing to still see these days books by self-proclaimed gurus presenting FooBar-ish sample code (due to lack of taste or lack of imagination) without an regard or respect to the readers. Whatever happened to coding style? Even though the book is written by two Microsofties that have actually worked intimately with VSTO, and that's a clear advantage, they sure utilize that in the finest way possible: almost every page has a code snippet, a diagram, a table, or even a screenshot. The prose is direct to the point and avoids going excessively over material that is already available elsewhere, making this book one of the few huge books that are actually not boring. Heck, you can actually start coding from the first chapter. Chapeau pas to Eric² for committing to deliver such a professional and comprehensive work.