MSDN Magazine - December 2007 - (Page 58) Andrew Whitechapel VSTO Build Office-Based Solutions Using WPF, WCF, and LINQ isual Studio® 2008 introduces an array of new features aimed at a wide range of customer solution types. Now you can build a Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) solution that uses Windows® Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and language integrated query expressions (LINQ), which I’ll show you shortly. The new technologies provide opportunities for building exciting solutions with behavior that was previously difficult or impossible to achieve. For example, though Microsoft® Office Excel® 2007 has powerful charting features, you can build an even richer experience when you combine the Excel calculation engine with enhanced UI and data visualization using WPF 3D animated graphics. As Office evolves into a true development platform, office-based solutions are becoming increasingly sophisticated, less document-focused, and more loosely coupled. The need for a support framework and a design-time toolset for building service-oriented solutions that connect a rich Office client with powerful serverside functionality and remote data is neatly filled by WCF. Visual Studio 2008 provides a simple GUI wizard that lets you consume WCF services without having to worry about service metadata, protocols, or XML configuration. LINQ enables developers to build more intuitive, greatly simplified code for querying data. One of the LINQ features Office developers will especially appreciate is the use of extension methods 58 msdnmagazine to support the traditional Office object model pattern of methods that have optional or explicit reference parameters. With Visual Studio 2008, you can build a solution that incorporates the native capabilities of an Office client application combined with the sophisticated UI capabilities of WPF that’s connected to remote data and services via WCF and uses the RAD features of LINQ to manipulate that data. This article is based on a prerelease version of Visual Studio 2008. All information herein is subject to change. This article uses the following technologies: VSTO, WPF, WCF, LINQ This article discusses: How VSTO makes Office development more powerful Using WCF, WPF, and LINQ in Office solutions ✥ Easily adding advanced features to your Office apps ✥ Building services the easy way ✥ ✥ Code download available at: msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/code07.aspx Andrew Whitechapel spent many years as an architect consultant building enterprise so lutions for a wide range of customers, and he is now Program Manager Technical Lead for the VSTO team at Microsoft. http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/code07.aspx
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