Creating an Add-in for Office 2007 and Office 2010 that “Lights Up” on Office 2010 (McLean Schofield)

Managed Office add-ins traditionally have been able to run in the targeted application (the version of the application whose PIAs the add-in references) and in later versions of the application. Therefore, if you need to create a single VSTO add-in that can be run in multiple versions of an application, the typical guidance is to develop the add-in by using a project template for the oldest version of Office that you want to support. For example, if your add-in needs to work with Office 2003 and Office 2007, you should create an Excel 2003 add-in (by using VSTO 2005 SE with Visual Studio 2005, or by using Visual Studio 2008). However, this strategy has several inconveniences: If you want to test/debug/run the add-in on your development computer, you must have the earliest version of Office you are targeting installed

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Creating an Add-in for Office 2007 and Office 2010 that “Lights Up” on Office 2010 (McLean Schofield)

VSTO Performance: Ribbon Reflection (Stephen Peters)

It is very easy to customize the Ribbon in your VSTO extension.  All you need to do is to add a Ribbon (Visual Designer) to your solution, and it will appear when your solution is run without needing to do any more work.  Behind the scenes, the VSTO runtime reflects through your entire addin assembly looking for Ribbon extensions to instantiate.  This reflection can cause a significant performance hit, especially on larger solutions.

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VSTO Performance: Ribbon Reflection (Stephen Peters)

How Do I: Customize the Outlook 2010 Explorer Fluent Ribbon UI ?

This video explains how to create a custom ribbon for the Outlook Explorer Window using Visual Studio 2010 and Office 2010 (beta 2 versions) This demo shows how to: – Create an Outlook 2010 project in Visual Studio 2010 – Add a Ribbon Visual Designer to the add-in project – Add controls to the Ribbon – Configure the appropriate settings to display the custom ribbon in the Outlook Explorer window

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How Do I: Customize the Outlook 2010 Explorer Fluent Ribbon UI ?

7. VSTO Bug Tracker : Using Document-Level Features in Add-Ins

Prior to Visual Studio 2008 SP1, you couldn’t use common VSTO features like controls in the document and databinding to list objects at the add-in level.  But with SP1 we introduced a way for you to use these features at the add-in level.  In this section some of the wierd ways Idid things in section 4 will start to make more sense—I designed the code in Section 4 to be easily portable to an add-in. One thing that won’t port to the add-in level is cached data—that feature only works when code is at the document level. Choose File > Add > New Project.

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7. VSTO Bug Tracker : Using Document-Level Features in Add-Ins