To start creating your own Office add-in, create a new project in Visual Studio by selecting any of the Office add-in project types. Figure 22.4 shows the basic project structure created with a Word add-in project. We have a single code-file that establishes the startup entry point for the add-in and provides us with the namespaces we need to access the Word automation object model.
There isn’t anything terribly compelling about the developer experience so far. But Visual Studio does provide a set of visual designers you can use to craft your Office solution just as you would any other project in Visual Studio. To access these, we need to add a project item that has an associated designer. To start, let’s see how to create a customized ribbon.