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This three--part article by Kaushal Sanghavi demonstrates the ways in which development environments can enhance your productivity through customizing and automating tasks and processes. In this first part of this article, which focuses on Visual Studio .NET add--ins, you'll look at the support that VS .NET provides for writing add--ins and macros that can extend and customize the development environment. In this second part, the article further demonstrates the use of VS .NET add--ins by showing you how to build two custom add--ins: one that adds an AutoSave feature to your projects, and another that synchronizes VS .NET task lists with Microsoft Outlook. In part three, Sanghavi explains how you can develop COM--based add--ins for Microsoft Office, and how you can use .NET components in these add--ins via COM Interop. You'll build an encryption add--in for Microsoft Word that uses the symmetric DES encryption algorithm to encrypt a part of a Word document based on a user--defined password.

• Takes developers step-by-step through the process of customizing Visual Studio to allow easier and faster incorporation of specialized subroutines, UI elements, and other components
• Shows how to customize the development environment for macros and add-ins created in any .NET-hosted language from Visual Studio to Perl, Delphi, COBOL, and Eiffel
• Supplies readers with the only print documentation available on all the Macro IDE menu commands
• Companion Web site includes all the source code and executables for the book

Visual Studio .NET is the most extensible development environment Microsoft has released to date. Organizations create add-ins for many purposes: to speed common tasks, to ease code reuse within an organization, and to enforce rules and consistency among developers. Effective use of add-ins can dramatically improve developer efficiency and reduce costs.

Writing Add-Ins for Visual Studio .NET is designed to get add-in developers up to speed in developing ad-ins in Visual Studio .NET and to teach add-in development to developers who want to learn to write add-ins. Author Les Smith also provides enough real code examples to challenge even experienced add-in developers.

Smiths book begins by teaching readers how to use the Add-In Wizard to create the basic add-in framework. From there, he covers the manipulation of code in windows and controls, and the manipulation of projects. Writing Add-Ins for Visual Studio .NET explores in detail, how to create an add-in user interface, including toolbars, toolbar buttons, and multiple-level menus, as well as how to create a user interface in the system tray. Smith also addresses the migration of add-ins from VB 6.0 to VB .NET for those developers who have previous experience in writing add-ins.

One of the great challenges that add-in developers will encounter is finding the right classes from among the 3,400 classes in the .NET Framework. Smith teaches and demonstrates use of the Visual Studio add-in object model to show readers how to use the methods and properties and respond to events in order to enhance the power of the integrated development environment (IDE).

Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) was released in August of 2003. It brought the power of .NET to developing Word and Excel applications. While powerful, it was also lacking in some key features, and difficult to use. VSTO 2005 will be released as part of the Whidbey release. It will be incorporated in the more advanced versions of Visual Studio .NET 2005, and will also be available as a stand-alone product. It has corrected many of the major problems with the first version, and is poised to experience a rapid growth in usage. Coverage has been expanded to include Outlook and InfoPath in addition to Word and Excel. This book is not only written by key members of the team that developed VSTO 2005, but it will also be the first book available on VSTO. The authors provide both an introduction to VSTO as well as a tutorial for using it, including lots of practical examples, and a refreshing honesty about both the strengths and pitfalls of the technology. This book will be a must-have for all the developers considering VSTO.