COM add-in programming for Outlook, Excel, Word, other Microsoft Office apps.

Add-in Express

Develop Office add-in /plug-in, smart tag in Visual Studio .NET and Delphi

Add-in Express is a powerful programming toolkit for Visual Studio and Delphi that will help you create application-level COM add-ins, smart tags and RTD servers for Microsoft Office 2010 - 2000 applications. All the add-ins / plug-ins for Outlook, Excel and Word that you can see on this site are built on Add-in Express.

Add-in Express key benefits:

• Visual designers instead of coding. You use visual designers to customize Office menus, toolbars, ribbons, task panes, forms, windows, regions, option and property pages, to add custom and customize built-in toolbars, main and context menus for all Microsoft Office applications.
• Version-neutrality. You develop one extension for all available Office versions (2000 - 2010) and Office suites (Student, Home, Standard, Professional, Professional Plus, Ultimate, Enterprise).
• Effective project architecture. Add-in Express generates ready-to-use solution templates based on our long-term experience in development and deployment of Office solutions. The Add-in Express architecture makes your Office solutions secure, isolated, managed, deployable and updatable with your minimal efforts.
• Advanced Outlook customization offers a unique GUI for your Outlook plug-ins. Use Advanced Outlook Form and View Regions to embed custom .NET forms into Outlook views and forms. Populate Outlook windows with any built-in or third-party controls, including e-mail, task and appointment windows, Reading pane, Navigation pane, To-Do bar, etc. As a result, you get full-featured Outlook plug-ins that work on all Outlook versions, across 2000 through 2010.
• Special features for extending the Excel GUI. You can build your own real-time data servers and new worksheet functions supported by Excel 2000 – 2010. Add-in Express supports two ways of creating custom worksheet functions, using Automation add-ins and XLL add-ins.
• Advanced Office task panes for Microsoft Office 2000 - 2010. Being more flexible than native Office task panes, the Advanced Task Panes let you customize the main Excel, Word and PowerPoint windows with native .NET forms that can be resizable, hidden, minimized (like the Outlook To-Do Bar) and dragged between task pane docks.
• Easy deployment. With Add-in Express the deployment of your Office extensions is so easy that you forget about it. Each Add-in Express solution contains a setup project with all necessary prerequisites. Plus, your solutions fully support ClickOnce, so just build and publish your solution once, deploy and update anywhere.
• True RAD - you write applied code only. Add-in Express is completely based on the Rapid Application Development approach and reduces the time you used to spend on Office extensions development at least by half. You write applied code only, Add-in Express does everything else.

Add-in Express is currently available in 2 editions:

Add-in Express for Office and .NET

Add-in Express for Office and VCL

If you need to create browser extensions for IE, please check Add-in Express for Internet Explorer

You write functional code only

Add-in Express builds its project over special RAD modules, visual designers and components that allow you to create add-ins, smart tags and RTD servers without coding their GUI. Add-in Express creates code skeletons, and you concentrate on the functionality of your add-ins. In other words, Add-in Express does all integration with your host application, and you write functional code only. As a result you get a version-independent extension that works in all Microsoft Office versions from Office 2000 to 2010.

Have a look at our flash videos and see for yourself:

• Developing Outlook 2007 add-in in .NET
• Developing Outlook plugin in Delphi

Supported IDEs and applications

Applications: Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Visio, Project, MapPoint, Publisher, FrontPage, Access and InfoPath.

Add-in Express for Office and .net supports: Visual Studio 2005, 2008, 2010; Visual Basic (VB.NET), C#, C++.NET, Delphi Prism

Add-in Express for Office and VCL supports: Delphi 5, 6, 7, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010 and Delphi XE (Architect, Enterprise, Professional editions; Turbo Delphi Win32

What's new in Add-in Express 2010

• Support for Office 2010 32-bit and 64-bit (.net edition only) including new features of Ribbon in Office 2010
• In-place designers for UI components
• Complete support for InstallShield
• Support for Load on Demand add-ins
• New setup project wizard (see also Modifying an existing setup project to support Office 2010, 32-bit and 64-bit, in Add-in Express 2010)
• Web-based MSI deployment (.net edition only)

Add-in Express customers say:

Add-in Express is the greatest tool for Office COM programming. First and foremost, superb code, and numerous examples to get you started quickly. But, beyond that, the quality of the technical support provided by Add-in Express alone is worth a pot of gold in itself! We were able to develop a project in no time, and always got great response any time we needed it. Way to go!

Jean-Guy Ducreux, President, Dewqs' Tribes
www.dewqs.com

More about:

Add-in Express for Office and .NET       Add-in Express for Office and VCL       Add-in Express for IE