Posts Tagged ‘COM add-ins’
Add-in Express and Windows hooks
Andrei Smolin | July 27th, 2021
Once in a couple of years Microsoft contacts us on this or that topic. The last topic was the Excel performance on Windows Desktop. They demonstrated a case where enabling an Add-in Express add-in produced an astounding 90-second delay when selecting another cell while Excel was busy with some long calculation... Read the rest of this entry →
Inner details of DPI scaling in Office COM add-ins
Andrei Smolin | June 17th, 2021
Today, I’m following Microsoft recommendations and using code fragments they provide to investigate the behavior of a System.Windows.Forms.Form (simply a form)... Read the rest of this entry →
Office COM add-ins and DPI awareness: research and analysis
Andrei Smolin | June 10th, 2021
In the first blog of this series, I showed issues related to using several monitors with different DPIs. To get an explanation of those pretty confusing results, let’s check resources available on the web.... Read the rest of this entry →
Issues with Windows mutli-DPI scaling and Office COM add-in panes and forms
Andrei Smolin | May 25th, 2021
Quite often these days you see this configuration: a notebook and an external display or two connected to the notebook. All these displays may have different DPIs. This is a typical environment where DPI-related issues reveal themselves. ... Read the rest of this entry →
Releasing COM objects: Garbage Collector vs. Marshal.RelseaseComObject
Andrei Smolin | July 20th, 2020
Just recently we've got a comment declaring one of our blogs on releasing COM objects "wrong and misleading": the author says Marshal.ReleasingComObject() and related things made him spend "lots of time on writing code that is totally unnecessary" and provides many links supporting the idea that you can use GC.Collect() to get rid of non-released COM objects.... Read the rest of this entry →
New version of Add-in Express sample COM add-in projects
Andrei Smolin | July 1st, 2020
Quick news: we've developed a new version of sample COM add-in projects that we provide in the downloadable archive on the Add-in Express .NET Downloads page... Read the rest of this entry →
How Add-in Express supports Office 365 / Office 2019
Andrei Smolin | June 16th, 2020
You might already know that Office 365 and Office 2019 are, in fact, subsequent builds of Office 2016: in any Office 365 and Office 2019 application, the Application.Version property returns a string that starts with "16"... Read the rest of this entry →
How to solve synchronization conflict when modifying Outlook item in ItemAdd event
Andrei Smolin | February 26th, 2020
I see this issue in the Sent Items folder on an Exchange account having Cached Exchange Mode turned on. Reportedly, turning the Cached Mode off solves the issue. The Outlook version used (Outlook 365 in my case) seems to be irrelevant as Google reports a similar conflict to occur in Outlook 2007... Read the rest of this entry →
Office from Microsoft Store: a spreading source of issues
Andrei Smolin | February 27th, 2019
The number of users having the Office version installed from Microsoft Store increases every day as computer vendors install it by default; see e.g. this support article from Dell. Per-user add-ins and some per-machine add-ins may run into a severe issue with that Office version. The issue is: the add-in uses old versions... Read the rest of this entry →
Range.Replace() problems in all Excel versions
Andrei Smolin | February 21st, 2018
Range.Replace() and supposedly Range.Find() may work incorrectly in a scenario we describe on the Excel for Developers forum. A workaround is: change Range.Value directly... Read the rest of this entry →
Add-in Express for Office issues on multiple monitors with different DPI settings
Andrei Smolin | December 20th, 2017
Microsoft has published Office 2016 build 8828.2010 through its Office Insider update channel. That build supports multiple monitors with different DPI settings; the support relies on the API changes provided by Windows 10 Creators Update.... Read the rest of this entry →
Large Address Aware in Outlook 2016
Andrei Smolin | December 19th, 2017
You might have heard of a recent update of Microsoft Outlook 2016 (LAA) that increased the memory available for Outlook from 2GB to 4GB. We've started receiving questions about how to deal with it. This blog is an answer... Read the rest of this entry →
Excel 2016 crashes if COM add-in creates a command bar control in a built-in context menu
Andrei Smolin | December 7th, 2017
Today's blog is about a recent crash reported by our customer. Our research shows that the crash occurs if your VSTO add-in or COM add-in creates a command bar control on a built-in context menu. We reproduce the crash when customizing the Cells context menu in this way... Read the rest of this entry →
Updating Office COM add-ins automatically
Andrei Smolin | November 10th, 2017
To test the example described below, download and run the application installing the sample COM add-in. When the add-in is installed, you start Excel 2000 - 2016 and find the add-in in the UI. Leave Excel open and in a couple of minutes, you'll get a notification suggesting installing an update... Read the rest of this entry →
Add-in Express supports Visual Studio 2017 Release
Dmitry Kostochko | March 16th, 2017
A couple of days ago, we published a new minor version of Add-in Express for Office and .NET that fully supports the newly released Visual Studio 2017. Now you can use any version of VS 2010 to VS 2017 to quickly create world-class extensions for all Microsoft Office versions and applications from prototype to final release... Read the rest of this entry →
How to customize MSI installer using Add-in Express ClickTwice custom actions
Andrei Smolin | February 2nd, 2017
Let's start with the conclusion: you can deeply customize the UI and behavior of the MSI installer of your Add-in Express based Office extension using a ClickTwice custom action. To see how this works, build the project below, install the add-in by starting the MSI installer, and have a closer look at that installer's UI... Read the rest of this entry →