Video HowTo: Support Office command bars and Ribbon UI in one add-in project (VB.NET)
Add-in Express supports creating COM add-ins for Office 2000 – 2010. Office 2000, XP and 2003 have a traditional command bar-based user interface, while Office 2007 is partially and Office 2010 is fully ribbonized. “How is it possible to support both types of user interfaces in one COM add-in project?” you may ask.
Here is the answer. All Add-in Express command bar oriented components have the UseForRibbon property. In most of those components (for instance, ADXCommandBar and ADXOlInspectorCommandBar), the UseForRibbon property is set to False by default, i.e. the components are not going to be used automatically in Ribbon-based host applications like Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint etc.
Now let’s see it in action:
Note.The ADXOlExplorerCommandBar component has the UseForRibbon property set to True by default. You need to change this property in the AddinInitialize event handler at run-time if you want to use an ADXRibbonTab in an Outlook 2010 Explorer window. You can check the version of the host application in which your add-in is run by using the HostVersion property.
This video sample was captured in Visual Studio 2008 (VB.NET) with Add-in Express 2009 for Office and .net.
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Supporting Office 2010, 32-bit and 64-bit, in a single COM add-in setup project
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