Office Development and the PIAs

  • Article

One of the things that many developers are doing with Office is writing
managed code applications. The fact is, Visual Studio Tools for the
Microsoft Office System is the way to go if
you are writing an app for Word, Excel, and InfoPath (sp1). The fact is, it does
more than just simplify the interaction between your managed code and the Office
executables.

That said, there are a number of things you need to think about when
doing any COM interop, and Office development is no exception. These are not
problems, they are just things you need to know about. To that end, we published
a truly fantastic article on Friday (it was long in the making): Handling
Complex COM Objects with Interop Assemblies or "Why Has My Menu Button Stopped
Working in Office?". This is a practical, straight-forward explanation of
some things you need to know about when doing COM interop with Office.
Here's the TOC:

  • Introduction
  • My Button Stopped Working
  • COM and .NET-based Memory Management
  • Managing COM Memory
  • Managing COM Objects with the AppDomain Class
  • Managing the COM Object with ReleaseComObject
  • Conclusion

Rock Thought
for the day: When I lived in Minneapolis/St.Paul area I became a big
fan of a radio station, Cities 97. This station introduced me to Richard
Thompson, Luka Bloom, and Bob Mould,
among others. Then, the station went through an identity crisis and tried to be
another pedestrian 70's and 80's rock station before inching back a little more
to its roots. I'm not sure what they are doing now. Artists like Luka
Bloom (he has a new album this year), Paul Westerberg,
Preston Reed, and Julie Cruise or Talk
Talk are hard to find on the over-commericialized dial. BTW: I have
misplaced my latest Foo Fighters CD- has anyone seen it?

Rock on