Programming in the
Office 2003 Environment
Corinne Hoisington
Can I still use VBA?
• Yes, but….
• Doc will always open, even if the VBA code
doesn’t run (not trusted)
• Office and Visual Studio combine to deliver
power and productivity for robust,
secure solutions
• Visual Studio Tools for Office makes writing
managed code behind Office documents as
simple as File | New | Project
MS Visual Studio Tools
• Microsoft® Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft
Office System provides a new set of Visual
Studio® .NET 2003 project templates you can
use to create assemblies that run in process with
Microsoft Office Excel 2003 and Microsoft Office
Word 2003. This enables you to create
document-centric solutions that utilize the power
of the hosting application, which, in this first
release, includes Excel and Word. Using either
Microsoft Visual Basic® .NET or Microsoft Visual
C#®
VB.NET Coding
Debugging
• When developers want to test an
application, they can simply click Start on
the Visual Studio .NET toolbar. This starts
up the Word document or Excel workbook
and runs the custom code. Developers
can then view the Word or Excel solution
and observe the results of the running
code. They can also set break points in
the code and be returned to Visual
Studio .NET for debugging purposes.
Order of Installation
• The order of product installation is important. On a
developer's computer, Visual Studio .NET 2003
Professional or higher must be installed first. As part
of its installation, Visual Studio installs version 1.1 of
the Microsoft .NET Framework. The .NET Framework
must be installed before Office 2003 to ensure that
the global assembly cache (GAC) is available. The
Office installation program installs the PIAs for the
Office applications, including the necessary Word
and Excel PIAs, into the GAC as part of the setup.
So, the installation order is:
• Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003
• Microsoft Office System
• Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System
New C#.NET
• Microsoft Office Word and Microsoft Office Excel
expose rich programming models, but those
object models were originally written to be
consumed by VBA clients. Visual Basic .NET,
even with Option Strict On, can handle most of
the requirements of the Office object models.
Consuming those object models with C#
requires a bit more care. When writing
applications using Visual Studio Tools for the
Microsoft Office System and C#, keep in mind
that you'll often need to make concessions to the
differences between the languages
Access 2003 Programming
• The Access 2003 Developer Extensions
provide the tools and resources
developers need to more quickly and
easily create, test and deploy
sophisticated Access solutions.