Professional VSTO 2005: Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office (Programmer to Programmer) (Paperback)

by Alvin Bruney (Author) "Visual Studio Tools for Office is the new kid on the block for harnessing the power and functionality of Microsoft Office technology..." (more)
Key Phrases: Visual Studio, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Excel (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Professional Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office satisfies the need to write enterprise software based on Office by delivering practical solutions for those seeking to port existing functionality to VSTO. The book focuses on code and implementation, not theory, with code examples presented in both VB and C#.

The book is especially written for enterprise developers - VBA or COM Interop savvy - who need to leverage the power and productivity of VSTO today. .NET developers seeking to explore VSTO as a potential solution will also find ample material that suits their needs.

This book covers VSTO 2005 in detail. The approach focuses on the major components that form the suite with the exception that InfoPath is not covered. All other components benefit from an exploration of the key objects that are most likely to be used in common programming scenarios. This book is organized into chapters that present the building blocks of VSTO first. Microsoft Excel and its Range objects form the cornerstone of range manipulation across the VSTO suite. For that reason, the first few chapters explain these basic concepts. Subsequent chapters use these building blocks as a starting point so it is important to be familiar with these concepts before skipping to the back of the book.

Once you gain a complete understanding of the Excel Range object in Chapters 2 and 3, you can apply that knowledge to the remaining chapters. In fact, Microsoft Word, Charts and Pivot Table manipulation are all based on the Excel Range object. (VSTO contains a potent charting engine second to none. And this book explores every facet of charting.) The obvious benefit of this clever architecture is that it significantly reduces the learning curve for those who wish to adopt this relatively new technology. And this book is designed to show you how to exploit this architecture.

From the Back Cover
Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office (VSTO) supports Word, Excel®, and Outlook® and allows developers to build robust Office applications in both the C# and VB languages. This practical guide shows you how to leverage the power of VSTO to write enterprise software targeting Office 2003. Even if you're not entirely familiar with VSTO, you'll find this book to be an indispensable resource to building your knowledge of this new technology.

Beginning chapters review basic concepts and serve as building blocks upon which the remaining chapters are built. Working examples provide solutions to common programming requirement issues so that even if you are a seasoned developer, you'll still find many useful techniques and strategies to solving enterprise-level software problems from an Office perspective using VSTO.

What you will learn from this book

• Maximizing Office 2003's power and flexibility in enterprise software
• Automating Office objects from Visual Studio and Windows Console applications
• Extracting functionality and performance from Word and Excel
• Creating exciting Excel charts and powerful PivotTable® reports
• Avoiding common pitfalls while porting VBA code to VSTO as well as work-arounds to technical limitations in the Office API

Who this book is for

This book is for developers who are planning to adopt VSTO as an enterprise solution. A familiarity with Object Oriented concepts is required. An understanding of Visual Studio .NET is recommended, but not required. Recent .NET adopters with a VBA background will find this book especially useful.

Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real-world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 313 pages
• Publisher: Wrox (May 8, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471788139
• ISBN-13: 978-0471788133
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #288,466 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1.0 out of 5 stars regret buying, November 1, 2008

By	Simon Wong (Taiwan) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

If anyone is evaluating this book I would recommend "Visual Studio Tools for Office" by Carter and Lippert

2.0 out of 5 stars Poorly written and poorly edited, September 3, 2007

By	Grahame "gsd" (California, USA) - See all my reviews

I bought this book because it was available from a 3rd party seller for a very low price. For the money it was okay. It got me familiar with VSTO. However, I'm very glad I didn't pay full price because frankly the text is full of errors, typos and mistakes. E.g., in one paragraph he is talking about the Range object and when referring to an object there is a particular font and style that is used. However, the Range gets referred to 1) using the style, 2) without the style but with a leading capital letter, 3) without the style and all lower case. Consequently I had to re-read the paragraph 3 or 4 times to figure out if he meant "range" in the English definition or the object. A pain. This sort of thing is all over the book.

Also I was reading it so I could automate Word and I found very little practical data in the chapters on Word.

So, unless you are getting it as cheap as I did, I'd say find a better book.

10 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If You've Decided to use VSTO, an Excellent Place to Start, June 6, 2006

By	John Matlock "Gunny" (Winnemucca, NV) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

VSTO (pronounced Visto) is a most interesting product when viewed from Microsoft's overall standpoint. It is a very carefully crafted product with the primary purpose of continuing Microsoft's continued dominance of the desktop marketplace, and a part of Microsoft's thrust to move more heavily into the server marketplace.

As best I can tell, it works something like this. Microsoft recognizes that servers handling up web pages, processing mail, etc. are a huge market, but that Linnux owns a big percentage of that market. Consequently Microsoft came up with the .NET strategy. .NET is a bunch of subroutines (if you will) that are written to provides all kinds of utility to programmers. You write your applications using propriatary programming languages such as C# and J# that use the .NET library and consequently have to run on Microsoft operating systems.

In the Office environment, packages such as OpenOffice have gotten to be pretty good, are basically Microsoft compatible so you don't have a re-training problem, and are FREE. I don't know how much success OpenOffice has had, but it appears to be enough to attract Microsoft's attention.

Enter VSTO. VSTO adds customization and productivity to Microsoft Office applications through 'links' that tie Office to the .NET framework. So to use VSTO first you must have and load the .NET framework, then you must load Visual Studio.NET - in that order -- then install Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office.

All of this is clearly explained by Mr. Bruney in this book, who then goes on to do an excellent job of explaing how to write programs using VSTO. As examples he includes some real world applications. Most of the book is on Excel applications, but Word and Outlook are included as well. Finally he concludes the book with an excellent discussion on pivot tables.

Conclusion: A well written, understandable and complete book on VSTO. If you're going to be using VSTO, this is an excellent place to start.