Creating an Office Add-In

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.

FIGURE 22.4 A Microsoft Word 2013 add-in project.

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.