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What alternatives exist for VSTO?
What does managedxll do that VSTO does not - When would you use one vs the other
Google does not bring much up on this subject
This is more of an interview question - What are the pros and cons and both is the crux of the question here
VSTO presumes you are using Visual Studio as your development platform, thus mainly targeting professional and corporate developers. 'Power users' who create macros and add-ins with VBA seem not to be the the target audience for VSTO.
If you are interested in add-ins for Excel, the native .xll add-ins have some specific advantages over VSTO, in particular they support creating high-performance user-defined functions. Libraries like ExcelDna (and ManagedXll which you mention) make it easy to create .xll add-ins for Excel using managed code. Contrary to what OmegaMan says, these .xll-based add-ins do not work through the Automation Add-in interfaces, support Excel versions from '97 to Excel 2010 and allow advanced features that VSTO does not support, like registration-free Ribbon and RTD support.
For creating add-ins for various other office applications, in particular for Outlook, you could also look at Add-In Express.
Apples and Oranges....managedxll is for help building automation add-ins and is limited. It only targets office 2003 (AFAIK).
VSTO gives the developer the ability to write C# code directly against the interops of Excel, create smart documents, forms ribbons and add-ins in separate .net assemblies of the .net language of one's choice.
Plus no runtime license is required for use of VSTO.
HTH
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My boss wanted an vsto outlook add in and I'm very close to finishing it. I need to write
the manifest and release it (and hope everything works).
So long story short, is there a way to read the old documentation?
When I look up the documentation, it changed, and I can't find the things I'm looking for. I find a lot
of the new stuff for the new Outlook (preview) but not for the old one. Stuff like the "old one is no more supported. That's how you can import your code",
"the new one is in javascript" - i wrote the code in C# with VS2022.
Like everything changed in few weeks.
I want to look up the old VSTO documentation about the manifest and how to integrate it, deploy it and maybe other stuff if some bugs appear.
(also strange: the docs say a vs solution creates 2 projects (app + manifest), but my solution has by default only 1 project, the app/add-in I assume).
You can start from the Walkthrough: Create your first VSTO Add-in for Outlook page. There you can find all the required information like Outlook object model overview and Outlook solutions.
There is no need to deal with VSTO manifests. What you really need is to create an installer for your add-in, there are two main ways for deploying VSTO add-ins:
Deploy an Office solution by using ClickOnce
Deploying a VSTO Solution Using Windows Installer
i created an installer and it was installed successfully, but the add-in didn't show up, and we had difficulties due to some security issues. So maybe i was wrong in thinking it could be a "missing manifest".
Thx for the answers and the information.
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I am considering which version of MS Office 2016 to use for developing office apps. I will be using Visual Studio Community 2015. I would like to know which suite version of MS Office 2016 is compatible with developing apps. I am worried that using a "Home and Student" version will not work with Visual Studio 2015 Community, like the "Professional" version will.
Also, is it possible to develop with Office 365 or is the desktop version required.
You have to have access to the product in order to test your add-in (this is true even before Office 2016). So purchase the edition that contains the products you want to develop for.
That being said, many of the office apps are available for free as part of Office Online, and as long as you are willing to develop web-compatible add-ins, you don't need to buy anything.
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I've created a method to generate a excel file in C#, and it works great. But after all the development, we begin to question ourselves on the possibility to create these files on machines that do not have Office installed. I've made a few searches, and nothing has been found.
So, does anybody know of a way to generate excel files without Excel installed on a machine, but using the Interop DLL and OFFICE.dll?
If there isn't a way do it, is there any library that can make this work?
This library works without office installed: http://epplus.codeplex.com/
I have used it a few times and it worked nicely for me.
Personnaly i use this lib : https://code.google.com/p/excellibrary/
working great !
I have used NPOI. Its free and very good. For most people the drawbacks below are not big issues and I am sure they will be developed later so I only put them here to aid consideration.
The minor problems that I have so far are:
You cant easily "transpose" your data.
You cant easily insert columns.
No problem inserting rows, but you have to write your own custom functionality to insert columns or to transpose. I'm sure there are other limitations but I have not come across them yet. Overall, if these are the only 2 problems I have, I'll not complain (especially considering I have sufficiently resolved them for my own purposes).
If I had to export again at some point, I'd probably give the Office OpenXML library a try. But I'm not sure if this requires you to store a file on the server or not before transferring (or have office installed on the server). If either of these were true, I'd have to say no personally. This is the reason I did not use Excel Package (Linked in other answers). Not sure if it's changed but when I researched it, you had to store the file on the server before transferring it.
You do not have to install Excel all what you need Microsoft Office 2010 Primary Interop Assemblies.
You can download them from:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/de-de/library/aa288681(v=vs.71).aspx
OR
http://msdn.microsoft.com/de-de/library/ms247298(v=office.11).aspx
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Looking for a library to create outlook add-in's for outlook 2010, 2007 and outlook 2003
Found this http://www.add-in-express.com/add-in-net/video.php which looks very good but also pricey since it's a general purpose library for creating addins for other office products as well
Is there any other library for comparison and hopefully cheaper too ! google search is inadequate with a rather generic name such as outlook add-in library/tool which return results for existing add-ins etc.
thanks
You are looking for NetOffice. It is a (free) set of version-independent interop assemblies for making Office add-ins targeting different versions.
NetOffice also has some additional assistance for managing the COM references, Intellisense help on each method to show which versions of the Office application support that method, and then some additional tools to manage your multi-version add-in projects.
The library I've found most helpful for interacting with Outlook's mail items and such is Redemption.
I have made a search and found some interesting starting point.
Creating an Outlook 2010 Add-In
Outlook 2007 Add-in Using Microsoft Visual C#.NET
However is not an easy task to be compatible with various version of Outlook
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I am updating an internal application that creates excel files based on a template, and I would like to recreate that functionality without having to use the excel interop. Does anyone know of any open source projects that can do this? I was using ExcelLibrary, but it does not work with the template.
Thanks!
EDIT: I am only interested in solutions that are known to work with existing *.xlt or *.xltx templates. Solutions where this is unknown are not helpful. Those can be found all over the web.
See OpenXML 2.0 from MS...
It is a free library that does NOT require office to be installed... you can read + write Office files including Excel and Word (Version 2007 and up...).
IF you need more features (like rendering to PDF etc.) and/or support for pre-2007 formats (like XLT) then you would need some 3rd-party library... not opensource... but take a look at Aspose.Cells - it handles XLT, XLTX, XLTM etc. too - for example regarding support for XLTX + XLTM see http://www.aspose.com/documentation/.net-components/aspose.cells-for-.net/feature-overview.html
Have a look at the following link, This library allows you to generate Excel Workbooks using XML, hope this help.
CarlosAg Excel Xml Writer Library
Can you try these libraries depending on whether you want to work with Excel 2003/2007 or 2010.
NPOI
koogra
Check out the Open XML SDK 2.0 from Microsoft.
Then you can use the Simple OOXML project to get you started.
Does not work for legacy office documents (i.e. doc/xls) only the new ones like docx and xslx.
hint: a docx/xslx is really a zip file full of xml documents. just change the extension to zip.
We've used OpenXml to generate Word documents. I'm sure you can generate Excel files as well.