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

This chapter introduced the three basic patterns of Office solutions: an automation executable, an add-in, and code behind a document. The chapter also introduced how to build solutions following these three basic patterns using Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office.

Now that you know how to create a basic automation-executable, add-in, and code-behind-the-document solution, you will use these skills in the next chapters as the focus turns to specific functionality of Excel, Word, Outlook, and InfoPath that you can use in your solutions.

This chapter has served only as an introduction to add-ins and code behind documents. Chapter 24, "Creating Outlook Add-Ins with VSTO," covers VSTO add-ins for Outlook. Chapter 23, "Developing COM Add-Ins for Word and Excel," covers COM add-ins for Word and Excel. Chapter 3, "Programming Excel," covers automation add-ins for Excel. Chapters 13 through 17"The VSTO Programming Model," "Using Windows Forms in VSTO," "Working with the Actions Pane," "Working with Smart Tags in VSTO," and "VSTO Data Programming," respectivelycover the code-behind-document model of VSTO in detail.