Visual Studio Tools for Office: Using Visual Basic 2005 with Excel, Word, Outlook, and InfoPath

A FULL TREATMENT of Microsoft's ADO.NET data programming model could easily fill an entire book of its own. Therefore, this chapter starts with an example of how to use the Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office (VSTO) designer to create a data-bound customized spreadsheet without writing a single line of code. After that, the chapter examines some ADO.NET features and then delves into the Word- and Excel-specific programming model.

To understand ADO.NET in all its complexity, read Shawn Wildermuth's Pragmatic ADO.NET (Addison-Wesley, 2003) and the data binding chapters of Windows Forms Programming in Visual Basic .NET (Addison-Wesley, 2004), by Chris Sells and Justin Gehtland.