Customer Reviews

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

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

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.

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.

Like so many books an help manuals written today, this book never tells you how the pieces fit together. The section on Word starts with an example which occurs on the "ThisDocument_Startup" event, which then opens another document. (Actually, most of the examples are nested in an event handler of that name.) The author doesn't tell us what would ever cause this code to execute -- is it part of a standalone application? Is it triggered when you open a particular file with Word? etc.

I need to write code which operates in place of a Word macro -- i.e. there's a toolbar added to Word via a Global Template, and it has a button, and when that button is clicked, an object is instantiated which then begins to interact with the user and with Word. I've skimmed the entire section on Word, and found nothing of relevance. I'm ready to just skip out and buy another book.