Customer Reviews

VSTO for Mere Mortals™: A VBA Developer's Guide to Microsoft Office Development Using Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office

5 star:		(5)
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3 star:		(1)
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Traditionally, developing on the Office platform meant that you would use VBA but Microsoft released Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) a few years ago to let .NET developers use their skills to develop managed Office applications. Moving from VBA to .NET is not easy because you need to learn so much new stuff especially if you never touched .NET in any way. "VSTO for Mere Mortals" is a book targeted at VBA developers who never used .NET before.

In the first chapters, the authors explain what is VSTO and what features are available for developers. Chapter 2 and 3 introduce the Visual Studio development environment and managed code. Seasoned .NET developers will skip these chapters but they are essential for people who never used Visual Studio before. The next chapters cover everything VSTO from Word, Excel and Outlook development to Smart Tags and database development. A full chapter is devoted to new features of VSTO 2005 SE and Office 2007.

If you're a VBA developer that wants to jump into .NET development using VSTO, look no further, this is the book for you. Experienced .NET will also find this book interesting but will skip a couple of .NET introduction chapters.

This book (VSTO for Mere Mortals) is very well written and easy to understand. I did not come from a programming background. I started by learning VBA so making the move from VBA to the .NET /VSTO world was a bit intimidating for me, however; after reading and following the examples in this book, making that leap is not as hard as I thought it would be. I love the detailed code samples in the book and the step-by-step way that they are presented. I really learned a lot from reading this book. Thank you to all that contributed to putting this book together.

A VBA programmer migrating to VSTO will appreciate a thorough yet easy-going introduction to Visual Studio and VB, discussion of deployment, etc. A VB programmer will be less happy, feeling that pages taken up by the already-familiar material would be better spent on VSTO proper. A C# programmer will share the sentiment, and, of course, notice that code here is exlusively VB. An Excel programmer - using VBA, VB or C# - will note that in the book Excel shares the stage with Word and Outlook, and accounts for but a fraction of the total page count. I am a C#/Excel fellow, and "VSTO for Mere Mortals" is clearly not the right choice for me: its coverage of VSTO + Excel is just not nearly sufficiently comprehensive or deep.

This book is part of the "For Mere Mortals" series, which sounds like it was created by the publisher to compete with the popular Dummies and Idiots books. However, McGrath's efforts are not a trivial read. What she describes is a considerable effort by Microsoft to migrate the myriad VBA developers towards .NET and Visual Studio 2005 Tools.

The emphasis is not on implementing abstractions like object oriented programming. Rather, it uses the reader's background in coding VBA and in MS Word and Excel. Nor are you expected to be proficient in database design or the intricacies of SQL Server. Much of the text is about front end material. Like using the conveniences of the VSTO user interface, with its many widgets and menus, to easily code.

Many new features are available, compared to what you previously had under VBA. The most striking example is now the nifty ability to have a data island. Imagine an Excel spreadsheet on one machine. That loads from a database on another. If the first machine is your laptop, and you take it somewhere isolated from the network, what happens to your data? Well, there is now a means of copying that data, while you're still connected, into a data cache on the laptop. Without having to go to the extent of running a full database on the laptop.

I found the book thorough and easy to read and follow. It reviewed .net extremely well, and made me aware of .net capabilities I had overlooked since the old ones worked.
I met a problem early on in my use of the book, communicated with the author, and got the help I needed to overcome the problem.
An excellent book on the subject.

In the beginning 4 chapters which help you sharpen the tool of Visual Studio. Which let you understand how easy to develop with VSTO as VBA in Office even VSTO is .NET programming.
The rest of the book base on it to work out some scenarios with VSTO so that you can apply in daily job.
Read this book then back to read "Visual Studio Tools for Office" do help a lot.

I should mention although I haven't really done much with the book that it lacks a sample code file download. This means you have to key in everything yourself to test and debug.

If you need a reference on how to write programs that interface with Office products then this is your book!