About the Code in This Book

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Code in this book for the most part will be in Visual Basic; therefore, the sample code for this book will for the most part be in Visual Basic. The reason for this is obvious: Visual Basic continues to be the single most popular programming language. However, I avoid most Visual Basic-specific commands so that you will find it trivial to migrate the code in this book to C#. The methods and properties referenced in the sample code apply to VB .NET, C#, and other .NET languages.

Most of the code supplied for this book is in the form of add-in projects or solutions. They consist of whole solutions, including all of the files for all of the projects in the solution. Normally, there is a solution (.sln) with two projects. There is a project for the add-in and a setup project for the solution. The easiest way to run the add-in on your machine is to load the add-in solution into Visual Studio .NET. You then need to build and install the add-in. This causes the proper registry entries to be created.

Note 

The Add-in Wizard will normally create the proper registry entries when an add-in is created initially.When an add-in is moved to another computer, as will be the case for the code for this book, the registry entries will not automatically be in the registry of the destination computer. This is true even when you try to start the add-in in debug mode.

In order for the add-in to run, it must be registered and the Add-in Manager must be able to see it. Building and installing the add-in will create the required registry entries for you. For information on how to build and install an add-in, please see the "Installing the New Add-in" section in Chapter 2. This subject is covered again in Chapter 13. In that chapter you will see a procedure for manually registering and creating the Add-in Manager registry entries.

You can download the code from this book from the Downloads section of the Apress Web site (http://www.apress.com). I trust that you will download the code from there, rather than typing it in from the book. There are two reasons for this. First, typing it in is a time-consuming and error-prone process. Second, there is a lot of code involved in one add-in, and there is at least one add-in in each of the chapters from Chapter 2 through Chapter 12.

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