MSDN Magazine Launch Issue - February 15, 2008 - (Page 54) Steve Fox V S T O 3.0 Developing Office Business Apps With Visual Studio 2008 y now, I’m sure you’ve heard quite a few appealing things about Visual Studio® 2008. It has some awesome features, such as support for LINQ, improved Web development, and tighter integration with Windows Vista® and SharePoint®, to name just a few. One area where Visual Studio 2008 really stands out, though, is in its support for Microsoft® Office solutions development. Visual Studio Team System 2005 included Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office (VSTO)—you could also download VSTO Second Edition to begin solution development for both Office 2003 applications and the 2007 Microsoft Office system. However, in Visual Studio 2008, all the VSTO project templates are included. You can use Visual Studio 2008, specifically VSTO 3.0, to develop Microsoft Outlook® customizations, which is what I’ll cover in this article. I’ll show you what you can do with a new type of form development technology called form regions, which can be special areas on existing Outlook forms. I’ll also show you how to add Windows® Presentation Foundation (WPF) support to form regions to help improve their look, feel, and interactivity. and brings many advantages of Windows Forms to the hosting environment of Outlook. For example, you can create a VSTO form region that connects to a Web service to acquire customer relationship management (CRM) data and display it in a grid. You can even add a custom Ribbon to an Outlook 2007 inspector that will host the custom form region and add code to the Ribbon so that it interacts with the controls on the region. Note that there are four types of Outlook 2007 form regions at your disposal: This article uses the following technologies: Visual Studio 2008 This article discusses: New features in Visual Studio 2008 ✥ Creating custom form regions for Outlook ✥ Connecting to a data source ✥ Adding search capabilities ✥ Code download available at: Extend Outlook 2007 with Custom Form Regions msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/code08.aspx Steve Fox is a Program Manager with the Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) team at Microsoft. He divides his time working externally with VSTO customers, providing VSTO training, delivering VSTO sessions at conferences, and working internally with the development team to help evolve the VSTO product. VSTO 3.0 provides a Windows Forms-based design environment in Visual Studio 2008. This allows you to design and code the new Outlook form regions in one development environment 54 msdnmagazine http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/code08.aspx
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