Customer Reviews

Developing Visual Basic Add-ins

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I tried to write an add-in. I got it working, but as far as getting it to really do what I wanted (something similar to NuMega DevPartner which can act on particular files in the project), this book didn't get me there. I'm not sure if the author has built any really useful add-ins either. There's certainly a market for a good book on it, but this isn't it. FWIW, I have the same author's book on programming Word, and I didn't find that any more useful than the online documentation, so perhaps this author just needs to get more into the material and then share what he learns. This book is probably too short, and perhaps the space to properly expound on the material was limited by the publisher.

With great excitement I purchased this book, when thumbing through it in the store it looked really promising. It truly does give alot more information than MS does, but it still leaves you confused a bit. The object models are shrugged off to very little commentary and figuring out the complexities of manipulating objects within a large program is not even touched. I had hoped that this topic had finally gotten serious consideration, it appears that this was only meant to be an intro book. I would highly recommend it if you only want to know what an add-in is, but if you want to do some serious programming with addins, you'll need alot more than this book.

I expected more from this book. The author notes (correctly) that the IDE Extensibility model is poorly documented by Microsoft. That's the reason that I bought this book, but it too fails in completely documenting the object model. After reading this book from cover to cover, I got the feeling that this book was thrown together quickly just to get it out. Some of it just seems like filler. For example, there's a chapter on Object Models. Those of us writing add-ins should know this by now. It was all VERY basic stuff. Many of his examples (expecially in the menus section) give examples that go against the MS Word menus. Why? We're writing this stuff for the VB IDE! Unfortunatly, this is about the only book I've found on writing add-ins. Maybe another one will surface soon.

Like others, I purchased this book because I was tired of screwing up my face at the pathetic Microsoft documentation.

Dr. Roman's explanations and sample code got right to the heart of the matter. Major kudos...

This book is very clear and well-written. I like Steven Roman's books because they cut through the fog and get down to the essential CONCEPTS. Some of the other reviewers seem to think the book should take them by the hand and do everything in the world for them. I, for one, and tired of bloated 1,000-page plus tomes where you can't see the forest for the trees. What I like about this book is the focus on the ideas.

This is a well-written, informative introduction to VB add-ins. It contains everything most VB developers need to know to get started writing their own add-ins.

A highly lucid text indeed on a topic area that not many writers have even attempt to get to grips with. After writing this text, I began to create add-in from memory. It's a shame there aren't more books like it.

I expected more

I was originally going to give this book 3 stars, but after reading the author's retaliatory comments, the best I could offer is a 2 (and I will never buy one of his books again - crybaby).

Mr. Roman's earlier book, Learn Word Programming, was excellent. Naturally, this lead me to believe that this book would be just as good. It wasn't.

I try to suggest other books in my reviews, but there aren't many that cover this exact topic. You might want to check "Learn Word 2000 VBA Document Automation", it has a few projects in there, but they are mainly concerned with Word. Other than that, I guess we will just have to wait for awhile.