COM Shared Add-in

What Is a COM Add-in?

A COM add-in is a dynamic-link library (DLL) that is specially registered for loading by the Microsoft® Office XP applications. You can build COM add-ins with any of the Office applications in Office XP Developer. In addition, you can create COM add-ins with Microsoft® Visual Basic® or Microsoft® Visual C

COM add-ins use the Component Object Model that makes it possible for you to create a single add-in that is available to one or many of the Office applications — Microsoft® Word, Microsoft® Excel, Microsoft® Access, Microsoft® PowerPoint^®, Microsoft® Outlook®, Microsoft® FrontPage®, or even the Visual Basic Editor. By developing COM add-ins, you can extend the functionality of your Office-based applications without adding complexity for users.

Creating COM Add-in's In Visual Studio 2005

If you want to create add-ins for Outlook using VS2005 using C#, you can use the Extensibility Projects. You can find these project templates in the "Other Project Types" > "Extensibility" > "Shared Add-in" folder. Word of caution, these add-ins are the old way of creating add-ins for Office and don't take advantage of the improvements that are made with the new VSTO add-in model.

Note: In this Article, the focus is on creating an Outlook Add-in which supports for the major versions of Microsoft Outlook i.e. Outlook 2000,XP/2002 and 2003. So we start the procedures from the Outlook XP/2002 and Outlook XP PIAs [Primary Interop Assemblies], as the applications thus developed will work in both Outlook 2000 and 2003 as we make it a Managed COM Add-in using the Shim wizard.

In my next post I will archive the details about XP PIA’s [Primary Interop Assemblies]

This Document suggested by: Jomone Augastine (jak0101@gmail.com)