Microsofta .Net Development for Microsoft Office

There is a ton of misleading and confusing information on the web regarding what technologies you can use to develop against specific versions of Office. This book gives you all the practical advice you need to hit the ground running with managed COM development in Office. From a thorough introduction of the technologies available and their pros and cons, to very specific examples that show workarounds to common problems such as using custom icons in a toolbar that you add programmatically, how to use a C++ shim to sign your .NET add-on and make sure that you won't run into security issues in strict corporate environments, etc. If you are starting out with managed COM development on the Office platform then this is the book you absolutely need. We bought this book to use on a team project and it was so good that I picked up a copy for personal use at home. The book does assume that you are a relatively experienced programmer. If you are interested in using Visual Studio Tools for Office instead of COM, then you should check out Eric Carter's Visual Studio Tools for Office instead but be aware that you can only target Office 2003+ using VSTO. You need to use COM, not VSTO, in order to target older versions of Office.

Anybody who does Office development knows that it's not pretty - there are many technologies involved, and it takes time and efforts to make everything work together. This book is a first attempt to present an overview of .NET Office development, and it will save you hours and hours of putting pieces together by searching MSDN and newsgroups. I wish this book was written years ago.

5 stars considering the first reviewer only gave it 1. Andrew's book is great, it provides complete coverage of all of the different techniques to work with Office and .NET. All of the examples that I tried worked fine; granted I didn't do every single one. As for "real programming" examples... I don't know what you mean. Usually it's hard for an author to know what everyone needs, but I think Andrew's examples were good. Thanks for putting all of this information together in one place. Yes, I'm sure most of it can be found on MSDN or Google, but if $50 saves me a day or two of searching the I'll take it. John