Some years ago, I had the opportunity to develop software for retail industry. Let me say that things looked pretty interesting back then, Windows XP was young and it seemed to provide functionality that we only had in our dreams. But part of the dream did not turned completely true, since I had to cope with ticket printers. If you had ever worked with ticket printers before, you will probably agree with me that most of the time you have to tweak or do some workaround because the driver for the printer does not provide a specific feature and the customer just doesn’t want to replace dozens of printers. Then there are the printer commands that your application must be aware of, and setti...

Some time ago I found myself challenged with the task of creating a solution that provided customizable data entry forms design and execution functionality. Feature aggregation was of the highest priority; therefore, the design team decided that forms were to be specified using our own XML-based definition language. Based on future users’ preferences, Microsoft Excel was chosen as runtime platform; this decision pushed us directly into VSTO world. The next two sections describe VSTO basic concepts. The description, while brief, is intended to expose only the necessary to understand the problem at hand. What is VSTO?VSTO stands for Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System. As...