VSTO Book Reccomendation

Bill Sheldon — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 16:42:00 GMT

As you can tell I'm using this morning to really catch up on my blog posts. I've been meaning to update them but things were busy and then I was sent on this assignment called 'vacation'. Turns out I really enjoyed that assignment... I need to post a couple picks of my wonderful neice and nephew, but I'm all ready for a repeat.

But for now I just wanted to send out a quick reference to a new technical book regarding Visual Studio Tools for Office(VSTO). The book is being published in September, but I was fortunate enough to get an early look because InterKnowlogy has been doing alot of VSTO work lately and Tim Huckaby (our CEO) spoke at Tech Ed on this topic. So after Tim took a look at the book so he could say what he thought of it he passed it to me and I put it to use. The book covers not only VSTO but integration with Microsoft Office 2003 from .NET 2.0. It talks about how to call office from your application and just as importantly how too build really powerfull VSTO apps. More importantly it doesn't draw a line in the sand with Word and Excel, this book goes into customizing Outlook and Infopath. This book covers stuff that some of our IK developers have had to learn the hard way.

The book will be released mid september but there is Addison-Wesley and a portion of Chapter 1 is posted here: http://www.awprofessional.com/title/0321334884

The version of Chapter One I previewed is noticably longer and the book comes with plenty of code samples. Although it's written in C# instead of my preffered language of Visual Basic I definitely recommend it for anyone who is looking to leverage the power of Office 2003 in their custom application. Converting samples from C# to VB just helps you really understand the code.