From VB6 to .NET. At last…

In one of my previous lives, I was a VBA and VB6 developer: ReDim, InStr, Msgbox, If Not Obj Is Nothing and other ugly things were part of that nice life. Now I live another life and have both VB.NET and C# experience gradually shifting to C#. If you are a late wayfarer on the [...]... Read the rest of this entry →

Video HowTo: Add any .net controls to Internet Explorer toolbars (VB.NET)

Besides Explorer bar and Explorer menus, I can suggest looking into one more visual thing that can be quickly customized with Add-in Express for Internet Explorer and .net. This is IE toolbars... Read the rest of this entry →

Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Add-in Express 2010

Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is quickly becoming one of the leading CRM Suites for midsized and large organizations according to a recent research report. You might ask how this affects you as Office developer ... Read the rest of this entry →

Insight of Add-in Express Loader

Add-in Express Loader is an unmanaged dll developed with the Visual C++ Active Template Library (ATL). It acts as a proxy between a host application and the real .NET library. The loader itself is never registered and it shouldn’t be. It is just specified as a dll to be loaded for managed classes ... Read the rest of this entry →

Windows Presentation Foundation, Office 2010 and Add-in Express 2010

If you look at the list of known issues for the latest release of Add-in Express 2010, you'll notice a specific issue I myself ran into not so long ago: WebViewPane region cannot be used for folders if their WebViewOn and WebViewUrl properties cannot be set. Possible solution is setting the "Allow Script in shared folders" and "Allow Script in Public Folders" options in the security settings ... Read the rest of this entry →

Video HowTo: Customize main and context menus in Internet Explorer (VB.NET)

Apart from Explorer bar there are a few more things that can be easily customized in Internet Explorer and today we will look into the customization of main menu and context menus. Yes, you can modify them by adding your own menu items... Read the rest of this entry →

Office 2010 Admin Templates and Add-in Express

If you look at the list of known issues for the latest release of Add-in Express 2010, you'll notice a specific issue I myself ran into not so long ago: WebViewPane region cannot be used for folders if their WebViewOn and WebViewUrl properties cannot be set. Possible solution is setting the "Allow Script in shared folders" and "Allow Script in Public Folders" options in the security settings ... Read the rest of this entry →

Video HowTo: Create a custom Explorer bar for Internet Explorer (VB.NET)

Let's talk about extending Internet Explorer user interface. What visual feature is most frequently used by an average user? I bet it is Favorites, of course after the Address Bar... Read the rest of this entry →

RTD Servers and Add-in Express 2010

Real-time data (RTD) is data that updates on its own schedule. The most common example is stock quotes, warehouse activities and web server loads. In this post, Northwind Traders has requested a sales dashboard in Excel that updates sales figures and targets dynamically by reading order information from their sales database... Read the rest of this entry →

HowTo: Communicate with a COM add-in from a standalone application

In order to get a standalone application to communicate with a COM add-in, the application needs to have access to the running host application (Microsoft Excel in our case), get the COMAddins collection, find a needed instance of the add-in there and use reflection to call public methods or retrieve public properties... Read the rest of this entry →

Video HowTo: Build and control Advanced Task Panes in Add-in Express 2010

What I really write about today is the topic of Office task panes. Office 2003 calls them action panes. Office 2007 and 2010 call them custom task panes. At Add-in Express , they are known as Advanced Task Panes. What are they?... Read the rest of this entry →

Outlook Events Logger Add-in – release version

Some weeks ago we published Beta 1 of Add-in Express Events Add-in for Outlook, free add-in or rater tool that can help you learn events in the Outlook 2000-2010 Object Model. Today we have the Release version ready... Read the rest of this entry →

Novel way to handle Outlook 2010 Fast Shutdown

In order to understand how Outlook’s Fast Shutdown mechanism affects your Outlook Add-ins, I have made a utility to test and demonstrate Outlook 2010 fast shutdown mechanism and an example Outlook Add-in... Read the rest of this entry →

Smart Tags and Add-in Express 2010

Smart Tags is a feature in Office by which Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook (if Word is used as the default editor) recognizes certain words and then presents the user with additional actions based on the selected text. It is available in Office 2002 to 2007, it is noticeably absent in Office 2010 as it has been deprecated, meaning that Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook will not automatically recognize words as in the previous versions... Read the rest of this entry →

Video HowTo: Build and control Advanced Outlook Regions in Add-in Express 2010

When it comes to building Office add-ins, Microsoft Outlook is perhaps the most popular application. No doubt that Excel and Word are close behind in popularity but Outlook wins this contest. I believe Outlook wins because it is the first application people open when they arrive in their office and it is the last one they close... Read the rest of this entry →

Controlling Outlook region’s state and form’s size in Add-in Express 2010

Here I will tell you how and where you can control the state of the regions where a custom task pane or an Outlook region is located, and also show how you can control the size of those forms... Read the rest of this entry →

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