Create Office plugins / add-ins in
Visual Studio .NET: VB, C#, C++

Add-in Express™
for Microsoft® Office and .net

Add-in Express Home > Add-in Express for Office and .NET > Online Guide

Why Add-in Express?

Microsoft gave us the term "Office Extensions". This term covers all the customization technologies provided for Microsoft Office applications. The technologies are:

Add-in Express allows you to overcome the basic problem when customizing Microsoft Office applications in .NET, namely integrating your solutions into the Office applications. Based on the true RAD paradigm, Add-in Express saves the time that otherwise you would spend on research, prototyping, and debugging numerous issues of any of the above-said technologies in all versions and updates of all Office applications. The issues include safe loading / unloading, host application startup / shutdown, as well as user-interaction-related and deployment-related issues.

Support all Office applications and versions with a single code base!

Add-in Express provides you with the powerful all-in-one framework to create version-neutral, secure, insolated, managed, easy deployable and updatable extensions for all Office applications and versions, all with a single code base!

  • Managed - you develop them in every programming language available for Visual Studio .NET: VB.NET C#, C++.
  • Isolated - Add-in Express allows loading Office extensions into separate application domains. So, they do not have a chance to break down other add-ins and the host application itself.
  • Version-neutral - the Add-in Express programming model and its core are version-neutral. It gives you a chance to develop one Office extension for all available Office versions, from 2000 to the newest 2021. More about building version-independent Office plug-ins.
  • Easy deployable and updatable Office extensions - Add-in Express automatically supplies you with a setup project making your solution ready-to-deploy. The start-up and deployment model used by Add-in Express allows updating your solutions at run-time. See Office addin deployment.

Supported IDEs:

  • Visual Studio 2022
  • Visual Studio 2019
  • Visual Studio 2017
  • Visual Studio 2015
  • Visual Studio 2013
  • Visual Studio 2012

Supported languages:

  • Visual Basic (VB.NET)
  • C#
  • C++.NET

Supported applications:

  • Microsoft Office Suites 2021 - 2000
  • Microsoft Outlook
  • Microsoft Excel
  • Microsoft Word
  • Microsoft PowerPoint
  • Microsoft Access
  • Microsoft Visio
  • Microsoft Project
  • Microsoft MapPoint
  • Microsoft OneNote
  • Microsoft FrontPage
  • Microsoft Publisher
  • Microsoft InfoPath