Customer Reviews

Developing Visual Studio .NET Macros and Add-Ins

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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.

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.

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.