Add-in Express 2007 for VSTO 2008.4.0

Add-in Express 2007 for VSTO 2008.4.0 combines richness of features, simplicity and plenty of power to use visual RAD designers, secure and isolated components, deployable and updatable templates of this component set to program professional extensions for Microsoft Office with minimal coding and debugging.

Enjoy lots of advanced features for VSTO 2005 (SE) and VSTO 2008: customize Office 2007 Ribbon UI and Office 2003 toolbars at design-time and run-time, add elements to Ribbon tabs, the Quick Access Toolbar and Office Menu and validate the resulting Ribbon XML in no time. Use special components to create custom task panes, application-level keyboard shortcuts and to embed custom .NET controls into Office toolbars. If you develop plug-ins for Outlook, get Outlook-specific command bars, option pages, and the ability to embed custom .NET forms into Outlook Explorer and Inspector windows, including the complete replacement of a folder view with a .NET form like Outlook Today does.

Add-in Express 2007 is based on the security and deployment model of VSTO 2005 and VSTO 2008, developed in C# and delivered with its source code. It completely supports application-level add-ins for Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Visio and InfoPath, and works for Visual Basic .NET and C#

Benefits:

1. Component-centric programming model. Add-in Express organizes your VSTO development over a set of Microsoft Office-specific components. You use components and their designers every time you need to create a new Microsoft Office toolbar or to connect to an existing toolbar, to customize your own ribbon tab, to add new items to Microsoft Office menus, etc. All your work is centralized by Add-in Express components.
   
2. Visual designers instead of coding. In most cases, you use visual designers instead of routine coding, say, when customizing Microsoft Office menus, toolbars, ribbons, handling Microsoft Outlook events, creating task panes, adding keyboard shortcuts, developing Microsoft Outlook view and form regions, property pages, deploying and redeploying projects and more.
3. Complete support of the classic GUI and the Ribbon UI. Add-in Express completely supports the classic Microsoft Office 2003 GUI as well as the newest Microsoft Office Ribbon UI. For Microsoft Office 2003 you can freely customize its toolbars and menus; for Microsoft Office 2007 you can add your own ribbon tabs and customize the Office Menu and Quick Access Toolbar.  
   
4. Any .NET controls on Microsoft Office toolbars. In addition to standard toolbar controls available in Microsoft Office 2003, you can place any .NET controls on your Microsoft Office 2003 toolbars. For example, you can use date-time pickers, grids, treeview, lists, etc. on any Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint toolbars. It works for Microsoft Outlook 2007 as well.
5. Advanced features for Microsoft Outlook. Add-in Express for VSTO supplies your Microsoft Outlook projects with powerful Outlook-specific features such as Advanced Microsoft Outlook Regions, option and property pages, shortcuts for the Microsoft Outlook Navigation Pane, event helpers for the Folders, Items and Item objects. For the first time, with Add-in Express you can customize any Microsoft Outlook views and forms using .NET controls and forms.
   
6. Custom task panes, action panes, keyboard shortcuts. With Add-in Express for VSTO you create custom action panes and task panes in few seconds. A special component centralizes all your task panes and binds them to Microsoft Office applications. In the same manner you can add your own application-level keyboard shortcuts. For example, in your add-in / plugin you can override the Ctrl-S and Ctrl-Shift-S shortcuts to intercept the built-in "Save and SaveAs" behavior.
7. Security and deployment experience. Add-in Express extends your VSTO projects with its components and follows your security and deployment model. All parts of Add-in Express are transparently integrated into the Microsoft Visual Studio IDE and your VSTO and setup project.   
   
8. True RAD - you write applied code only. Add-in Express is a time-saving tool. It is completely based on the Rapid Application Development (True RAD) paradigm and empowers you to significantly speed up the development and deployment for Microsoft Office.
   

Major Features:

1. Design-time support of custom Ribbon tabs, Microsoft Office menu, Quick Access Toolbar, command bars and commandbar controls, menu items, context menu items.
2. Adding Microsoft Outlook options page and folder property pages at design-time.
3. Trapping any built-in controls on Microsoft Office toolbars and ribbons, and handling them in your own way instead of the standard one.
4. Version-independent event processing.
5. Context-sensitive binding of your toolbars or their separate controls.
6. Determining keyboard shortcut processing settings at design-time.
7. Adding Action Panes in Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word 2003 and custom Task Panes in Microsoft Office 2007 at design time.

Enhancements: Version 2008.4.0

1. Added the OnActionEx event to the ADXBuiltInControl component.
2. Added the ClickOnce beta-support for the Add-in Express based projects (see documentation).

Requirements:

• NET Framework 1.0 or 1.1
• VS.NET 7.0 or 7.1