Summit Software

The VSTA SDK provides samples and help topics that show you how to dynamically add host items to VSTA add-in projects. However, If you've read the topic "How to: Add and Remove Host Items in an Add-in Project", you might have been a bit confused by the following code snippet:

Where did the value of this last parameter come from? The documentation does not make this very clear, so I will quickly explain.

This parameter refers to the location of a host item template.

The host item template is just a file that contains code that want to appear inside of a host item class that you dynamically create.

The code featured in the example above refers to the host item template that ships with the samples. For your application, you must create your own host item template.  Your template does not have to match the one featured in the sample.  It can contain anything that you want.

However, you might want to make use of two replacement variables that are featured in the host item template of the sample: [!output SAFE_NAMESPACE_NAME] and [!output SAFE_CLASS_NAME]. 

VSTA will replace these variables when you create the host item.  [!output SAFE_NAMESPACE_NAME] is replaced with the namespace of your add-in project and [!output SAFE_CLASS_NAME] is replaced with the name (first parameter) that you pass into the AddProjectHostItem() method.

Once you have created your host item template, you can pass the location of that template to the AddProjectHostItem method to create host item classes in your add-in project.

Norm E.

Come join us for a webcast on September 27, 2007 at 9:00 AM PST to learn about customer success stories who are using VSTA and the innovations we have made in VSTA 2.0.

Naveen Yajaman, Program Manager on the VSTA team will be presenting.

For more event details and registration: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032351235&Culture=en-US 

In this session we will discuss customer success stories using VSTA v1.0. We will also have demos of the new features in VSTA v2.0 and some discussion around that. It will be a good forum to ask questions.

Come join us for a webcast on September 27, 2007 at 9:00 AM PST to learn about customer success stories who are using VSTA and the innovations we have made in VSTA 2.0.

Naveen Yajaman, Program Manager on the VSTA team will be presenting.

For more event details and registration: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032351235&Culture=en-US 

In this session we will discuss customer success stories using VSTA v1.0. We will also have demos of the new features in VSTA v2.0 and some discussion around that. It will be a good forum to ask questions.

The InfoPath team shows you how to integrate the .Net Framework help into the VSTA IDE for InfoPath. Make sure you follow the note about starting InfoPath as an administrator if you are using Windows Vista with UAC turned on (which you should be doing and is the default behavior)

Read more here on the InfoPath team blog.

How to Integrate the .NET Framework SDK Documentation with VSTA

This blog post greatly expands upon the MSDN online help.

http://msdn2.Microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa944989(VS.80).aspx

-Paul

The InfoPath team shows you how to integrate the .Net Framework help into the VSTA IDE for InfoPath. Make sure you follow the note about starting InfoPath as an administrator if you are using Windows Vista with UAC turned on (which you should be doing and is the default behavior)

Read more here on the InfoPath team blog.

How to Integrate the .NET Framework SDK Documentation with VSTA

This blog post greatly expands upon the MSDN online help.

http://msdn2.Microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa944989(VS.80).aspx

-Paul

Harry Miller who is a documentation writer on the VSTO and VSTA team has created a short video that looks at VSTA. This video does an excellent job at explaining at a high level (manager view) what is VSTA, what are some of the features and how it is integrated.

Watch video.

ShapeApp sample application.

ShapeApp macro recording.

ShapeApp macro generated code

I also want to thank Kathleen for working with Harry to post this on her blog.

Harry Miller who is a documentation writer on the VSTO and VSTA team has created a short video that looks at VSTA. This video does an excellent job at explaining at a high level (manager view) what is VSTA, what are some of the features and how it is integrated.

Watch video.

ShapeApp sample application.

ShapeApp macro recording.

ShapeApp macro generated code

I also want to thank Kathleen for working with Harry to post this on her blog.

Solgenia is one the of first ISV customers to integrate Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA) into their GeoMap software suite.

Russ Fustino will be doing a demo of Solgenia's VSTA integration at Teched 2007 in Orlando this June.

Read more about VSTA on Solgenia's site http://www.solgenia.com/include/read.asp?lang=&IdArt=5342&IdCat=426

By now you have seen Visual Studio Tools for Applications in Office InfoPath 2007 and have been wondering about how to integrate VSTA into your applications. Watch Eric and Naveen take you through the features and design goals of VSTA.

Watch Now

By now you have seen Visual Studio Tools for Applications in Office InfoPath 2007 and have been wondering about how to integrate VSTA into your applications. Watch Eric and Naveen take you through the features and design goals of VSTA.

Watch Now

I am pleased to announce the release of the Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Applications Software Development Kit (SDK). VSTA allows Independent Software Vendors (ISV) and enterprises to add application customization to their applications. Microsoft InfoPath 2007 has integrated VSTA. You can see VSTA in action by designing an InfoPath form and pressing Alt-Shift-F12 to launch the VSTA development environment. Think of VSTA as the managed alternative to VBA. VSTA and VBA can also run side by side within the same application so your users can create customizations in the language that makes sense for them.

Get started today by downloading the VSTA SDK and going through the walkthrough that takes you step by step through the integration of VSTA into a sample application called ShapeApp.

Be sure to visit the VSTA Developer Center for more details.

One of the cool features of VSTA is that it can exist side by side with VBA in the host application. This allows hosts to slowly migrate their users to managed code over time. Summit has created a sample walkthrough showing you how to integrate VBA and VSTA into the SDK sample application, ShapeApp.

Integrating VSTA with an Unmanaged VBA-Enabled Application

Paul Stubbs
Program Manager

It has been a while since I’ve blogged, and I still haven’t delivered on my promise that I would explain how to control the AppDomain into which an add-in will be loaded.  I’m not going to deliver on that promise today, either; mostly because I think that before I can dig into some of the more advanced performance and partial-trust scenarios supported by the AddInManager, we need to talk about how to shut down add-ins that are already running.

Once the add-in is loaded, all that needs to be done is to call AddIn.Unload specifying an appropriate timeout value.  Calling this method notifies the add-in that it needs to do any cleanup, and then tears down the add-ins domain.

This brings us to another one of the classes in the AIM: the AppDomainBinding.  The AppDomainBinding is used to track which add-ins are loaded into which AppDomains.  For example, in the event that you do not want to unload the AppDomain after the add-in unloads, you can set the AddIn.AppDomainBinding.AutoUnload property to false.  In general, this is not a good practice, since unloading the AppDomain is the only means of unloading code in the CLR, but the functionality is there if you need it.  The reason for auto-unloading the AppDomain by default is that since an assembly by itself cannot be unloaded, we must tear down the entire AppDomain to ensure that the user’s code has stopped executing.

Another interesting point about unloading is that it isn’t guaranteed to terminate.  What if the user’s code contains an infinite loop in their OnShutdown handler?  Avoiding this and other potential pitfalls caused by bugs in end-user’s code has become an entire discipline itself, so I won’t go into it here.  Suffice to say there is an easy way that you can avoid the 80% case of an add-in failing to shut down: pass a timeout value to Unload.  By doing so, the AIM executes the add-ins shutdown logic on another thread and waits for it to finish within the specified timeout.  If it does not, the thread is aborted and the AppDomain unloaded without further delay.  There are a myriad of other things that a poorly-written or malicious add-in can do to cause the hosting application to hang, but passing an appropriate timeout value should be a help in handing some of the more common errors from preventing the add-in from unloading.

Aaron Hare,

Software Developer