Posts Tagged ‘.NET’

Add-in Express and Windows hooks

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

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

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

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

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 →

Office from Microsoft Store: a spreading source of issues

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 →

Support for Office 2019 is added to Add-in Express for Office and .net

Version 9.2 of Add-in Express for Office and .net is published, and we now announce full support for all versions of Office 2000 through 2019 32-bit and 64-bit... Read the rest of this entry →

Version 9.0 of Add-in Express for Office is out!

Long-term customers of Add-in Express know that we usually sim-ship new releases with new versions of Microsoft Office. This time is different. While Microsoft guys are probably still working on the new features of Office 2019, the new major version of Add-in Express for Office and .net is live already... Read the rest of this entry →

Add-in Express for Office issues on multiple monitors with different DPI settings

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 →

Updating Office COM add-ins automatically

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 →

How to customize MSI installer using Add-in Express ClickTwice custom actions

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 →

Localization of Office add-ins using forms-based resources

The article describes how to create a localized version of an Office add-in by using regular forms-based resources without having to apply them manually to each component, form or control... Read the rest of this entry →

Add-in Express sim-ships with Visual Studio 2017 RC

Last month Microsoft published Release Candidate of Visual Studio 2017. We, as Microsoft Visual Studio Industry Partner, were invited to support this version at the RC stage, and we were happy to seize the opportunity... Read the rest of this entry →

Introducing automatic updates for Office extensions

Version 8.3 of Add-in Express for Office and .net added support for automatic updates when using ClickTwice – MSI-based web deployment technology, this technology is closely tied with Add-in Express... Read the rest of this entry →

Office context menu add-in for Excel, Outlook, Word, PowerPoint

The blog is about an add-in (with the source code) that adds a button to all context menus of Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Project, Publisher, Visio and Word in Office 2010-2013. The button shows the name of the context menu.... Read the rest of this entry →

Working with Outlook HTMLBody – a guide for Office developers

If you've ever tried to design an attractive and somewhat complex e-mail message using Microsoft Outlook and HTML, chances are you very quickly realized that the Outlook mail message body format performs rather differently than a normal web browser... Read the rest of this entry →

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