Developing Visual Studio .NET Macros and Add-Ins [Paperback]

Jeff Cogswell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 11, 2003 | ISBN-10: 0471237523 | ISBN-13: 978-0471237525 | Edition: 1

• Takes developers step-by-step through the process of customizing Visual Studio to allow easier and faster incorporation of specialized subroutines, UI elements, and other components
• Shows how to customize the development environment for macros and add-ins created in any .NET-hosted language from Visual Studio to Perl, Delphi, COBOL, and Eiffel
• Supplies readers with the only print documentation available on all the Macro IDE menu commands
• Companion Web site includes all the source code and executables for the book

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Learn how to supercharge Visual Studio .NET with this in-depth guide to creating customized macros and add-ins

Whether you simply need to automate a repetitive task or make a full-scale improvement to Visual Studio .NET, Jeff Cogswell will quickly teach you how in this comprehensive book. You’ll find all the tools necessary to create customized macros and add-ins using the Macros Integrated Development Environment (IDE) of Visual Studio .NET, and the only print documentation available on how to gain complete control over the IDE’s menus.

With clear and concise details, Cogswell walks you through macro development, showing you how to automate processes in Visual Studio .NET.

He explains how to use Visual Studio .NET to write add-ins for Microsoft Office, and how to integrate Microsoft Office products such as Word, Excel, and Outlook right into Visual Studio .NET.

Along the way, he also uncovers the ins and outs of deploying your add-ins and presents expert tips and techniques on how to supercharge Visual Studio .NET.

With this book, you’ll learn how to:

• Program against the object model and how to develop, save, deploy, and reuse add-ins
• Customize Visual Studio .NET to allow easier and faster incorporation of specialized subroutines, UI elements, and other components
• Develop satellite DLLs that provide for globalization of your software
• Customize the development environment for macros and add-ins created in any .NET-hosted language from Visual Studio to Perl, Delphi, COBOL, and Eiffel

The companion Web site contains all of the source code for the book.

About the Author

JEFF COGSWELL is a software engineer, author, and consultant. A former teacher, Cogswell has written numerous books, including C++ All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies® (also from Wiley).

Product Details

• Paperback: 456 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (April 11, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471237523
• ISBN-13: 978-0471237525
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #848,662 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I'm a software engineer and teacher by trade. I've been programming for years. Much of my day-job work has been in the telecom industry, although I remain active in the educational areas as well. I live in the Cincinnati area with Angie.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Deceptive title..., May 24, 2005

By 

Sashidhar Kokku (Westborough, MA , United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Developing Visual Studio .NET Macros and Add-Ins (Paperback)

I was looking for writing add-in's and 90% of the book was to writing macro's.

Waste of my $$$. Highly recommend NOT TO BUY THIS BOOK.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Simplifies the black art of Macros and Addins, January 7, 2007

By 

Eric W. Engler "Avid Reader" (Atlanta, GA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Developing Visual Studio .NET Macros and Add-Ins (Paperback)

This book has the best coverage of macros I've seen anywhere, but it also does a pretty good job of explaining the basics of addins. Although his addin samples are in [...] I had no trouble translating them to C# (but macros have to use [...] by their nature). This doesn't cover the new COM-less style addins in VS2005 (this book is older than VS2005), but it remains the best intro book on VS addins, and the overall best book on macros. It has a few small errors, but when you consider how few books there are on this subject you simply have to take notice. More advanced readers will likely want "Working with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005", by Craig Skibo, Marc Young, and Brian Johnson.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Step by step VS.NET extensions, December 29, 2004

By 

Jack D. Herrington "engineer and author" (Silicon Valley, CA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Developing Visual Studio .NET Macros and Add-Ins (Paperback)

This is a solid step-by-step walkthrough of creating macros and extensions for VS.NET primarily in VB.NET, but with some coverage of C# and C++. The style is friendly and easy to read.

There are a few oversized screenshots, and some of the code runs a little long without annotation. In addition the reference value could have been enhanced. The reference that is there is minimal and I'm not sure how useful it would be. There is some coverage of building add-ons for Office, which is too short to be useful and could have been dropped.

Despite it's faults the book is still a good end-to-end walkthrough of developing and deploying add-ins.