New Visual Basic 2005 Edition of VSTO book

I'm really excited to announce that the Visual Basic edition of the VSTO book is now available. For more information see https://www.awprofessional.com/title/0321411757

Several new-book-related observations. First, I'm really pleased with the enhancements we made to this edition of the book. The layout has been refined making for a book that is easier to read and navigate. For example, next to the page number on the right facing pages the book has the section heading to make it easier to navigate large chapters with lots of sections. The book has a nice "Contents at a Glance" which shows an abbreviated table of contents which is easy to reference in addition to the full table of contents. It also has a listing of figures and code listings which is handy.

It was interesting revising the book for Visual Basic. As I've remarked before, Office development is often much easier using Visual Basic as opposed to C#. I elaborated on this in Chapter 1:

"This edition of the book focuses on using the Visual Basic 2005 language to program against Office. Visual Basic is a much easier language to use for Office development than the C# language. The Visual Basic language and the Office object models “grew up” together over the years and as a result the Visual Basic language deals much more easily with features of the Office object models like optional parameters and loose typing than C# does. If you compare the Visual Basic edition of this book to the C# edition you will often find the code samples are simpler than the C# samples because of the way Visual Basic simplifies calling the Office object models."

Finally, I want to let you know that all the listings in the book will be downloadable in the next several days on the awprofessional.com website. If you are looking for the C# listings in a downloadable format, I have posted them here. I will post the link to the VB listings as soon as they are available.