Chapter 3: The Smart Desktop Add-in

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Overview

"The value of most critics cannot be measured".

--Don Howard

In Chapter 2, you learned how to use the Add-in Wizard to create a simple add-in. You made some minor modifications to the wizard-generated code in order to trace the flow of the add-in operation and to make the add-in actually respond to communication to and from the user.

In this chapter, you are going to build on the base add-in code that you already have and take the add-in a few steps further to make it do some useful work for you. About 90 percent of the features that I have built into my add-ins have been the result of running into two situations in application development. First, I was faced with doing some mundane task associated with application code over and over. Second, I found that mass find and replace and a series of "cut and paste" was going to be a very long and error-prone process.

For these and other reasons, I constantly keep in mind that adding a feature to an existing add-in is usually a task that will take from a few minutes to a few hours at the most. Next, I try to think ahead and see if the current problem will present itself to me again in the near future. If so, I determine whether or not it will be a constantly recurring problem. Finally, I consider if a new add-in feature can be added relatively quickly and easily. If so, I usually stop what I am doing, bite the bullet for a short time, and develop the new add-in feature. Usually, the time that I spend creating the new functionality will be paid for the first time that I use it. In other words, it usually does not take any more time to create the new add-in feature than it would to have performed the mundane, repetitive, errorprone manual process, and now I have a tool built that will save me hours the next time that I encounter the problem.

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