MSDN Magazine - December 2008 - (Page 63)

sions.dll. For example, the extensions for As it happens, the sequence of operations Excel are defined within the namespace Miin this solution starts with the most complex crosoft.Office.Interop.Excel.Extensions and use of the extensions and ends with the simbuilt into an assembly named Microsoft.Ofplest use of the extensions. For this reason, fice.Interop.Excel.Extensions.dll. we’ll examine the major steps in reverse order, Note that the extensions are essentially before putting everything together in the corvery thin wrappers to the Office primary inrect order. Figure 3 summarizes the solution terop assemblies (PIAs), and you therefore requirements and the features of the extenneed to have the appropriate Office PIAs insions used to meet each requirement. stalled in order for the extensions to work. The PIAs are installed by default with the Word Extensions 2007 Office system, and optionally with OfIn our example solution, the operations we fice 2003. Alternatively, you can use the PIA Figure 1 Sample Application Main perform using Word are simple: insert some redistributables, documented at msdn.micro- Window text and set its style, then move to the end soft.com/library/kh3965hw. Although the extensions are produced by of the document and paste in an Excel chart from the Clipboard. the same team that produces VSTO, you can use the extensions in One of the awkward features of the Office object models, which is any solution that uses Office regardless of whether you are build- particularly prevalent in Word, is the use of reference parameters. ing a VSTO solution. For example, the Document.Range method in Word takes two parameters: the start position and the end position of the range you Using the Extensions want to fetch. In C#, both these parameters must be passed as exTo explore the extensions, we’ll build a solution that invokes func- plicit variables by reference. tionality in three Office applications: Outlook, Excel, and Word. Our application is not a VSTO solution; rather it is a simple Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application that automates the Office applications in turn. First, it fetches e-mail data from Outlook and performs some simple calculations on that data; then it feeds the results into Excel to produce a chart; and finally it pastes the chart into a Word document and saves it. These three tasks have been separated out so that they can be controlled individually by the user via buttons in the main window (see Figure 1). This is obviously an artificial mechanism, but it serves an important teaching purpose: to separate each operation so that it can be examined in isolation. Also, any of the tasks can be performed using either the raw PIA objects or the extensions library, in any permutation. The final output from the application is a Word document in HTML format that contains an Excel chart generated from Outlook data. The Outlook dataset of interest is the size of a selected set of e-mail items, as well as the date and time they were sent and received. The chart plots the size of each item against the elapsed time between sending and receiving it. This document is shown Figure 2 HTML Document Produced by the Application in Figure 2. Figure 3 Solution Features Mapped to Extension Features solution Feature Fetch selected data from e-mail inbox. use e-mail data to create a chart. Paste the chart into a document and save it. Office Application outlook Excel Problem addressed Build a filtered query without using an error-prone DASL query string. Specify Excel cell ranges without using the parameterized get_Range property. Find all negative cell values and set them to zero, in a performant manner. Invoke Office functionality using strongly typed parameters. Invoke Office functionality without having to pass optional parameters. use Word features without having to pass parameters explicitly by reference. Extension Feature LINQ-to-DASL. Parameterized properties.Collections exposed via parameterized properties. LINQ-to-Objects. Strongly typed method overloading. Strongly typed optional parameters. Nullable types. Object initializers. Word msdnmagazine.com December 2008 63 http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/kh3965hw http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/kh3965hw http://www.msdnmagazine.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of MSDN Magazine - December 2008

MSDN Magazine - December 2008 Contents Toolbox CLR Inside Out Advanced Basics Cutting Edge Patterns In Practice Team System Real-World WF Visual Studio OBA Tools SOA Data Access Geneva Framework Test Run Foundations Windows With C++ Going Places End Bracket

MSDN Magazine - December 2008

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