Visual Studio Tools for Office
– Getting Started
Introduction
VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office) provides a development
environment on top of Visual Studio to create OBAs (Office Business
Applications) or Office client customizations.
The current version is VSTO 3.0 SP1 which comes with VS 2008
SP1. There is a version compatible to VS 2005 also. VSTO allows developing
add-ins and customizations for both Office 2003 and Office 2007 though the
support for Office 2007 is much better.
As part of supporting OBA development, VSTO provides
development environment for creating two types of solutions:
·
Office client add-ins and customizations
·
SharePoint workflow solutions.
For Office clients mainly two types of custom solutions can
be developed:
·
Application Add-ins: They get installed on top of Office
client applications and thus help in customizing the default behavior and
look/feel of office client products.
·
Document Level customizations: Instead of Add-ins which
get installed at application level, these get attached to a particular document
instance only.
Deployment features supported:
·
ClickOnce for deployment of VSTO solutions including deploying
Primary Interop Assemblies.
·
.NET Framework Client Profile supported.
Preparing development computer for Office Development
Following components are required on development machine to
do Office development, to be installed in below order:
·
Microsoft .NET framework 3.5 sp1 or later.
·
Office 2007 client for which solutions needs to be developed.
·
Primary Interop Assemblies
·
Visual Studio Tools for Office.
Visual Studio Tools for Office is included with the
following editions of Visual Studio:
·
Visual Studio 2008 Professional
·
Team Edition for Architects
·
Team Edition for Database Professionals
·
Team Edition for Developers
·
Team Edition for Testers
Preparing end user computer for Office Solutions
Following components are required on end user machine to
deploy and run Office solutions, to be installed in below order:
·
Microsoft .NET framework 3.5 sp1 or later.
·
Office 2007 client for which solutions needs to be developed.
·
Primary Interop Assemblies
·
Visual Studio Tools for Office Runtime.
Primary Interop Assemblies (PIA)
PIA enable managed code to interact with Microsoft Office
application’s COM-based object model. They need to be installed and registered
in Global Assembly Cache (GAC).
The two ways of installing PIA are:
·
Perform full Microsoft Office installation.
·
PIA redistributable package: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=59daebaa-bed4-4282-a28c-b864d8bfa513&DisplayLang=en
Visual Studio Tools for Office Runtime
VSTO runtime is required to be installed on end user
computers to run the office solutions.
Microsoft Visual Studio
Tools for the Microsoft Office system (version 3.0 Runtime) is for the 2007 Microsoft
Office system. The Setup program is VSTOR30.exe.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=54EB3A5A-0E52-40F9-A2D1-EECD7A092DCB&displaylang=en
The runtime includes managed assemblies that provide
the communication layer between custom Office solution and the Microsoft Office
application, and unmanaged components that the application uses to load custom
Office solution.
Assemblies in the Visual Studio Tools for Office 3.0 Runtime
The following table lists
the assemblies that are included in the Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for the
Microsoft Office system (version 3.0 Runtime).
|
Assembly name
|
Description
|
|
Microsoft.Office.Tools.Common.v9.0.dll
|
·
The AddIn base class
for application-level add-ins.
·
Classes for creating actions panes and smart tags in
document-level customizations.
·
Classes for creating custom task panes in application-level
add-ins.
·
Classes for creating Ribbon customizations.
|
|
Microsoft.Office.Tools.Excel.v9.0.dll
|
Provides host items and host controls for Excel
document-level customizations.
|
|
Microsoft.Office.Tools.Outlook.v9.0.dll
|
Provides classes that you can use to create custom
form regions in Outlook add-ins.
|
|
Microsoft.Office.Tools.Word.v9.0.dll
|
Provides host items and host controls for Word
document-level customizations.
|
|
Microsoft.Office.Tools.v9.0.dll
|
·
The RemoteBindableComponent
class, which provides the data binding capabilities for host controls in
document-level customizations.
|
|
Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Applications.Runtime.v9.0.dll
|
·
The CachedAttribute
attribute and ICachedType classes,
which you can use to cache data objects in a document-level customization.
·
Exceptions that can be thrown by the Visual Studio Tools for
Office runtime.
|
|
Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Applications.ServerDocument.v9.0.dll
|
The ServerDocument
class, which you can use to programmatically attach customization assemblies
to documents and to access the cached data in documents.
|
|
Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Office.Runtime.v9.0.dll
|
The AddInSecurityEntry
and UserInclusionList
classes, which you can use to create user inclusion list entries to grant
trust to a Visual Studio Tools for Office solution for the 2007 Microsoft
Office system. For more information, see Trusting Office Solutions by
Using Inclusion Lists (2007 System).
|
|
Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Office.AppInfoDocument.v9.0.dll
Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Office.Contract.v9.0.dll
|
Provide classes that are part of the Microsoft
Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office system (version 3.0 Runtime)
infrastructure. These classes are not intended to be used directly from your
code.
|
VSTO Project Types
The various Office 2003 project types supported by VSTO 2008
SP1 are following:
The various Office 2007 project types supported by VSTO 2008
SP1 are following:
The following table shows which applications you can use with each project
type.
|
Project types
|
2007 Microsoft Office system
|
Microsoft Office 2003
|
|
Document-level
customizations
|
Word 2007
Excel 2007
|
Word 2003
Excel 2003
|
|
Application-level
add-ins
|
Excel 2007
InfoPath 2007
Outlook 2007
PowerPoint
2007
Project 2007
Visio 2007
Word 2007
|
Excel 2003
Outlook 2003
PowerPoint
2003
Project 2003
Visio 2003
Word 2003
|
|
SharePoint
workflows
|
SharePoint
Server 2007
|
Not supported
|
The following table shows
which project types provide each feature.
|
Feature
|
Projects types that provide the feature
|
|
Actions pane.
|
All document-level projects.
|
|
ClickOnce deployment.
|
Application-level and document-level projects for
the 2007 Microsoft Office system.
|
|
Custom task panes.
|
Application-level projects for
the following applications:
·
Excel 2007
·
InfoPath 2007
·
Outlook 2007
·
PowerPoint 2007
·
Word 2007
|
|
Custom XML parts.
|
Document-level projects for the
2007 Microsoft Office system.
Application level projects for the following
applications:
·
Excel 2007
·
PowerPoint 2007
·
Word 2007
|
|
Data cache.
|
All document-level projects.
|
|
Expose an object in a document-level customization
to VBA code in the document.
|
Document-level projects for the 2007 Microsoft
Office system.
|
|
Expose an object in an application-level add-in to
other Microsoft Office solutions.
|
All application-level projects.
|
|
The following host controls:
·
Chart
·
ListObject
·
NamedRange
·
Content
·
Bookmark
|
All document-level projects.
Application-level projects for Word 2007 and Excel
2007.
|
|
The following host controls:
·
XMLMappedRange
·
XMLNode
·
XMLNodes
|
All document-level projects.
|
|
Outlook form regions.
|
Application-level projects for Outlook 2007.
|
|
Ribbon customizations.
|
Document-level projects for the
2007 Microsoft Office system.
Application-level projects for the following
applications:
·
Excel 2007
·
Outlook 2007
·
PowerPoint 2007
·
Word 2007
|
|
Smart tags (using the Visual Studio Tools for
Office programming model).
|
All document-level projects.
Application-level projects for Word 2007 and Excel
2007.
|
|
Visual document designer.
|
All document-level projects.
|