Visual Studio Tools for Office: Using C# with Excel, Word, Outlook, and InfoPath [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Introduction

Office has a user interface that has been designed to make it as easy as possible for an end user to access the functionality provided by each Office application. But the application that you are writing that is integrated with Office will have its own very specific user-interface requirements. The application you write will have user-interface needs that are not met by the default Office user interface.

In previous versions of Office, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) provided the ability to show User Forms to meet your application user-interface requirements. You could also use custom ActiveX controls on the document surface. Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) adds Windows Forms control support to Office to meet your user-interface needs.

Moving from ActiveX to Windows Forms

When we started designing VSTO, being able to build applications that extended the default Office user interface was one of our primary goals. We also wanted to ensure that developers writing managed code would not have to rely on ActiveX controls to do so.NET developers want to use Windows Forms controls. To address these requirements, the team came up with a design to integrate Windows Forms deeply into Office. The vision was to allow you to use Windows Forms controls and forms in all the places you could use ActiveX controls and User Forms in previous versions of Office. We also wanted to make the design and coding experience similar to that of a traditional Windows Forms application.Chapter 15, "Working with Actions Pane."

When to Use Windows Forms Controls on the Document Surface

VSTO enables developers to put Windows Forms controls on the document surface. Just because you can put a control onto the document surface does not necessarily mean it is a good idea for your particular application. When should you use a control on a document as opposed to using a form, an intrinsic Office user-interface element such as a cell or a hyperlink, a custom menu command or toolbar button, a Smart Tag, or the actions pane?

Think about how you expect the document or spreadsheet to be used and how you want to extend the interface. Maybe you are going to use an Excel spreadsheet as a front end to corporate data. For example, many stockbrokers use Excel as their primary input and display mechanism when trading. In this scenario, the spreadsheet is very rarely e-mailed or printed, so changing the spreadsheet interface to meet the application requirements makes a lot of sense. Putting a Windows Forms button control on the surface of the document meets the requirement of making the spreadsheet more interactive and provides obvious actions that are available to the user of the spreadsheet. Figure 14-1 shows two Windows Forms buttons that have been placed on a spreadsheetone that refreshes the stock quotes and the other that trades a particular stock.

Sometimes you will have data that needs to be edited with a more effective user interface than Office provides. A good example of this is date input. Excel and Word provide a rich mechanism to display dates but do not provide an easy to use mechanism for entering dates other than basic text input. Windows Forms provides a DateTimePicker control that makes it easy for a user to enter a date. Combining the date entry interface provided by the DateTimePicker and the display capabilities of Excel or Word results in a more effective user interface.

You could integrate the DateTimePicker into your workbook, as shown in Figure 14-2. Here we have added a DateTimePicker control for each cell containing a date. The DateTimePicker provides a combo box drop-down that shows a calendar that the user can use to pick a different date.

using System;
using System.Data;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using Microsoft.VisualStudio.OfficeTools.Interop.Runtime;
using Excel = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel;
using Office = Microsoft.Office.Core;
namespace ExcelWorkbook1
{
public partial class Sheet1
{
public Button btn1;
public Form form1;
private void Sheet1_Startup(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
MessageBox.Show(System.Threading.Thread.ManagedThreadID);
btn1 = new Button();
btn1.Click += new EventHandler(btn1_Click);
form1 = new Form();
form1.Controls.Add(btn1);
form1.Show();
Globals.ThisWorkbook.BeforeClose += 
new Excel.WorkbookEvents_BeforeCloseEventHandler(
ThisWorkbook_BeforeClose);
}
void btn1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
MessageBox.Show(System.Threading.Thread.ManagedThreadID);
}
void ThisWorkbook_BeforeClose(ref bool Cancel)
{
form1.Close();
}
#region VSTO Designer generated code
private void InternalStartup()
{
this.Startup += new System.EventHandler(this.Sheet1_Startup);
}
#endregion
}
}