Office Development

Hi,

having had a look at the Visual Studio Express, I'm rather thrilled, especially as code developed with it can be distributed commercially. However, I am wondering about teh implications of one point on the comparison site. Does the fact that Office Development is not supported mean that the "new" (I'm used to VB6) Office Tools of .Net are not supported, or that even the basic office objects as available in VB6 are not offered Can I still open a connection to, say, Powerpoint, and run some VBA macro code on it

Thanks for the help!



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Office Development

  • Sayeed

    I've had the opportunity to try it out myself by now, and can happily claim that the com interface works just like it used to.  You need to add a project reference to the Office module you want to access, then there will be a new set of objects available.  I tried some Powerpoint manipulation that looks like this:

            Dim ppApp As PowerPoint.Application
            Dim ppPres As PowerPoint.Presentation

            ppApp = CreateObject("PowerPoint.Application")
            ppPres = ppApp.Presentations.Add(Office.MsoTriState.msoTrue)
           
            ppApp.Activate()
            ppApp.Visible = Office.MsoTriState.msoTrue
            ppApp.WindowState = PowerPoint.PpWindowState.ppWindowMinimized
         ppApp.ActiveWindow.View.GotoSlide(index:=ppApp.ActivePresentation.Slides.Add(index:=1, Layout:=PowerPoint.PpSlideLayout.ppLayoutBlank).SlideIndex)

  • Zane S.

    Can you use Express for com appd I didn't think you could, I have looked for this in the ELUA, but could not find anything that was clear one way or the other. Can anyone point this out to me, I must be thick!


  • VANA


    Microsoft Office development using .NET is supported through VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office).

    In addition, you can still use automation via COM Interop with the Office applications.

    Working with the Office XP Primary Interop Assemblies
    Installing and Using the Office 2003 Primary Interop Assemblies



  • Office Development