WPF in Excel

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WPF in Excel
Choosing UI frameworks for new Add-in 
Gavin Howard




Posts: 14
Joined: 2016-12-01
We are currently choosing the UI technology to write a new Excel Add-in in our firm. Quite a lot of the team has a background in WPF and given the ability to test the components as they are built would be preferable. However, I noted from your release notes and a few of the forum posts that there is an incompatibility between WPF and Office applications in general.

We intend to build an Excel add-in that makes use of a side panel to drive user input to cells and perform data retrieval from a web service.

The known issues states:
WPF + Office 2000 - 2016 Issues:
- Various issues remain in all Office and .NET Framework versions caused by a
partial incompatibility of the WPF core and Office GUI
(Case #850; MS bugs).

Is there a list of these "Various issues"? This will help guide our decision and whether it affects our use cases with what we intend to do with the UI.

There is also a recurring link to, I'm guessing, the issue you have logged with MS on the issue:
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=422485

But I am unable to access it. Is there an up-to-date link?

Thanks in advance.
Posted 06 Dec, 2016 06:26:43 Top
Andrei Smolin


Add-in Express team


Posts: 18787
Joined: 2006-05-11
Hello Gavin,

Actually, we now have only one WPF-related issue: a WPF context menu or the dropdown part of a WPF combobox may collapse immediately after you expand it; this may occur if the control in question is located on an Add-in Express pane. We've provided a workaround for this issue; check the sample project at http://temp.add-in-express.com/support/WpfPopupWorkaround.zip. We haven't invented a decent way to incorporate this workaround in the code of Add-in Express.

Gavin Howard writes:
There is also a recurring link to, I'm guessing, the issue you have logged with MS on the issue:


That link described another issue: if you expand a context menu or the dropdown part of a combobox and then click in the host application's window, the control may state expanded; this may occur if the control in question is located on a Custom Task Pane. This issue wasn't started by us so we don't know its current status. I haven't been able to reproduce it in Excel 2016 on a custom task pane shown by an add-in built using .NET Framework 4.X.


Andrei Smolin
Add-in Express Team Leader
Posted 07 Dec, 2016 09:26:58 Top