Four Advanced Office Programming

Part Four covers some advanced Office programming scenarios, including using the XML features of Excel and Word and building COM add-ins for Word and Excel and VSTO add-ins for Outlook.

• Chapter 21, "Working with XML in Excel," explores Excel's XML schema mapping capabilities and the features of VSTO that are enabled when you map a schema into the document.
• Chapter 22, "Working with XML in Word," explores Word's XML schema mapping capabilities and the features of VSTO that are enabled when you map a schema into the document. This chapter also covers VSTO's support for the WordML file format.
• Chapter 23, "Developing COM Add-ins for Word and Excel," describes how to create a managed COM add-in in .NET for Word and Excel. This chapter also explores the pitfalls to avoid when writing a managed COM add-in.
• Chapter 24, "Creating Outlook Add-ins with VSTO," covers add-in development for Outlook. In particular, this chapter examines the support for creating a VSTO Outlook add-in and the way that helps avoid the pitfalls with managed COM add-in development described in Chapter 23. This chapter also describes some Outlook-specific issues you might encounter when developing a managed COM add-in that you can avoid by building a VSTO Outlook add-in instead.