In this article, I will show you some basic functionality of Visual Studio Tools for Office, XLINQ, .NET framework v3.5 and the new Ribbon Designer in Visual Studio 2008 Professional. The end product will be a Microsoft Word 2007 add-in that will allow users to add images from Yahoo Images straight into their documents via a custom task panel and to find the keywords in their documents. The Yahoo REST web services will be used, and XLINQ will be used to query the XML results. The ribbon designer will be used to add buttons to the ribbon.

-

Visual Studio Tools for Office, part of Visual Studio 2008 Professional, allow developers to create document-centric solutions in .NET that integrate with Word, Excel, Outlook, etc with managed code.