Community developer blogs

Andrew Whitechapel

Recent Posts

• Moving Blog (Temporarily?)

  Posted: 04 Oct 2005 at 14:41 by Andrew Whitechapel

  The Indefatigable Chris Kunicki started me blogging, and I've had my blog on the OfficeZealot site ever since. Of course it goes without saying that the OZ site is the best place to be, and I've been very happy here. However, I believe in trying new things, so I'm having a bash at the MSDN blog

• Good Misha and Evil Misha

  Posted: 09 Sep 2005 at 21:21 by Andrew Whitechapel

  We're heading down to LA at the crack of dawn tomorrow morning (well, ok 1pm). PDC this year is going to be a blast. Lots of cool new stuff that's actually close to shipping, plus lots of really exciting newer stuff that's a little further away. A chance to see Microsoft's directions and roadmap. A

• PDC Los Angeles Sep11-18

  Posted: 05 Sep 2005 at 15:31 by Andrew Whitechapel

  Blimey, 2 months have gone by since my last post. Apart from shipping Whidbey (a minor detail), I've been coordinating PDC this year for my team (VSTO). We have 8 sessions, an all-day pre-con session, 2 Hands-on-Labs, slots in keynotes, and a bunch of demos. PDC this year is about Vista and about Of

• PDC 05

  Posted: 18 Jul 2005 at 00:30 by Andrew Whitechapel

  PDC will be in Los Angeles again this year. For details, start here. For anyone who went in 2003, a few points: The event was very crowded last time, so this year there's a (slightly) lower maximum number of attendees. This is good news for the simple logistics of getting from session A to session B

• Outlook Shutdown and VSTO Add-ins

  Posted: 10 Jul 2005 at 19:32 by Andrew Whitechapel

  Just back from Amsterdam. My TechEd talk on VSTO Outlook Add-in Support was the usual curate's egg. Some people liked it, and welcomed the technical detail. Others - curiously for a 'technical education' conference, felt that it was _too_ technical and complained that I hadn't cracked enough jokes.

• TechEd Amsterdam

  Posted: 07 Jul 2005 at 04:21 by Andrew Whitechapel

  TechEd Europe has been going very well this week. Very busy, lots of people asking questions about VSTO for Word, Excel, Infopath and Outlook. Lots of interest in our new support for managed add-ins. My session on VSTO Outlook Add-ins is on Thursday at 1200. Meanwhile, I've been working on the Instr

• TechEd Europe – I’ll be there

  Posted: 23 Jun 2005 at 01:36 by Andrew Whitechapel

  This year, TechEd Europe is in Amsterdam again, on 5-8 July (pre-con on 4-July). This is Microsoft’s flagship technical education conference for developers and IT professionals focusing on current and upcoming technologies. Here’s the main page.   I’ll be giving a talk on the

• Managed Add-ins for Office

  Posted: 09 Jun 2005 at 02:23 by Andrew Whitechapel

  We did some work a while back to support managed add-ins in Office by ensuring appdomain isolation. We provided some VS wizards that generate unmanaged C++ code for a shim component that you register with your add-in. All this works pretty well, but it is not actually a supported product. Also, ther

• Implementing IDTExtensibility2 in an Automation Add-in

  Posted: 09 Jun 2005 at 02:17 by Andrew Whitechapel

  The OZ blog engine had a minor mishap the other day, so I'm reposting a couple of entries here (with the help of Neville van der Merwe, who helped me resurrect the old posts). Neville raised a good point about using IDTExtensibility2 in an automation add-in. You can indeed use the default Visual Stu

• Example Shimmed Automation Add-in

  Posted: 21 May 2005 at 17:10 by Andrew Whitechapel

  A number of people have asked me for a detailed example of how to shim a managed Excel automation add-in, so here goes. This is a very simple automation add-in that exposes 2 functions: Fahr2Cel (converts fahrenheit to celsius) and Cel2Fahr (converts celsius to fahrenheit). Neither function is

• PocketNerd

  Posted: 23 Apr 2005 at 19:03 by Andrew Whitechapel

  For some time now, this odd fellow has been quietly building useful stuff on his site. His latest little gem looks nothing like a lettuce, and is in fact a very useful Visual Studio (2003) wizard for building wizards. You can build standalone Winforms applications that behave like wizards, or wizard

• Getting the Application Object in a Shimmed Automation Add-in

  Posted: 10 Apr 2005 at 19:45 by Andrew Whitechapel

  Building a managed automation add-in is one way to implement Excel user-defined functions (UDFs). The traditional way is to build an XLL and there was a healthy discussion about the pros and cons of this in one of my posts. In an even earlier one, I talked about shimming your managed automation add-

• Long Live the RGA

  Posted: 06 Mar 2005 at 23:10 by Andrew Whitechapel

  Although there are a rather a lot of things to do right now, what with trying to get VS Whidbey out the door, and settling into my new life in the pacific northwest, I did get over to the VSTO 2005 DevLab as much as I could this week. Coming from MCS into the product groups in Redmond, I do have som

• VSTO 2005 PodCast

  Posted: 26 Feb 2005 at 12:58 by Andrew Whitechapel

  The indefatigable Kunicki and Ice-cream Maxson have decided to get into the Pod Casting game. Their first recorded show is up on the OfficeZealot Podcast site here. This is a very accessible chat (53 mins) that you can listen to online or download in MP3 form. Charles and Chris talk about the Office

• Optional Volatile UDFs

  Posted: 06 Feb 2005 at 18:16 by Andrew Whitechapel

  Continuing the theme from my last post on Volatile Managed UDFs... In my previous post, I talked about how to mark a UDF as volatile, but I hard-coded this into each method. With traditional (XLL/XLA style) unmanaged UDFs, the user had the option to specify whether or not an individual call to a UDF

• Volatile Managed UDFs

  Posted: 29 Jan 2005 at 23:50 by Andrew Whitechapel

  In previous posts and in my book, I discussed how to build managed User-Defined Functions (that is, managed Automation Add-ins that expose functions for use in cell formulas) for Excel. Eric Carter has also explored the topic in his blog. One small detail that I didn't mention is how to build v

• Why is it so hard to build add-ins?

  Posted: 16 Jan 2005 at 00:00 by Andrew Whitechapel

  Why do have have so much trouble plugging addins into applications?   ...and how many different models do we support? Let me count the ways...   1.                  Unmanaged COM (IDTExtensibility2) add-in

• Even Better COM Shims

  Posted: 02 Nov 2004 at 07:03 by Andrew Whitechapel

  We finalized the COM Shim Wizards some time ago, and they're up on msdn for download here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4c586367-c733-4c68-9971-373c180ec114&DisplayLang=en ...with the covering article here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en

• Shimming Managed Automation Add-ins

  Posted: 29 Aug 2004 at 06:53 by Andrew Whitechapel

  Since blogging about the COM shim wizards, I've had a few emails asking whether the shim can be applied to managed automation add-ins. Before we consider shims, some context is in order. Automation add-ins were introduced for Excel starting with Excel 2002 (XP) - the point of automation add-ins is t

• COM Shim Wizards

  Posted: 02 Aug 2004 at 08:55 by Andrew Whitechapel

  I mentioned ages ago that I've been working on a set of Visual Studio wizards for building unmanaged (COM) shims for managed extensions. By 'extensions', I mean add-ins, smart tags and realtime data components. All of these should be shimmed. VSTO codebehind assemblies and smart doc assemblies are s