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Developing Office Solutions

After you design a Visual Studio Tools for Office solution and set up the project files, you can begin to concentrate on implementing the code and custom user interface (UI).

When you develop a Visual Studio Tools for Office solution, you write code in a class that is named a host item. The host item is the entry point for your code, and it also provides entry points into the object model of the host application. For more information, see Office Solutions Programming Model.

The type of solution that you are creating determines which features you can use in your project. For example, you can add Windows Forms controls and extended Microsoft Office controls (named host controls) to document-level customizations, but this feature is not available to application-level add-ins. For more information about features that are specific to different types of solutions, see Programming Application-Level Add-Ins, Programming Document-Level Customizations, and Office UI Customization.

For background information to help you plan your Office solutions and procedures to help you create projects, see Designing Office Solutions.

See Also

Tasks

How to: Target the Office Multilingual User Interface

How to: Create and Modify Custom Document Properties

How to: Read from and Write to Document Properties

Walkthrough: Creating Your First Application-Level Add-in for Excel

Walkthrough: Creating Your First Document-Level Customization for Excel

Walkthrough: Creating Your First Application-Level Add-in for Outlook

Walkthrough: Creating Your First Application-Level Add-in for PowerPoint

Walkthrough: Creating Your First Application-Level Add-in for Project

Walkthrough: Creating Your First Application-Level Add-in for Word

Walkthrough: Creating Your First Document-Level Customization For Word

Concepts

Office Solutions Programming Model

Managed Code and Office Programming with Visual Studio

Writing Code in Office Solutions

Programming Application-Level Add-Ins

Programming Document-Level Customizations

Office UI Customization

Accessibility in Visual Studio Tools for Office

Threading Support in Office

Additional Office Solution Development Resources

Other Resources

Data in Office Solutions

Project Extensibility in Visual Studio Tools for Office

Troubleshooting Office Solutions