Unleash the power of office add-ins with Office Development Patterns and Practices

Hi All,

I was pleased to speak at Cap Area .NET SharePoint Special Interest Group user group yesterday.
In this presentation i covered the underlying concepts of extending office applications and how Microsoft is supporting the component architecture by enabling web extensiblity framework (WEF); hence the WEF is the core runtime platform for building web based extensions or addins to office applications.

I covered the following topics:
1) Office Add-Ins overview: Add-ins shapes/types, runtime framework, anatomy of office add-in.
2) Building Office Add-Ins using open source tools such as: Yeoman tool (yeoman.io) provides a scaffolding platform for office addins templates. while when creating an add-in using yeoman tool you will be able to use any text editor to develop your office add-in.

2) VS tools for Office Add-ins: this covers updated tools in Office Developer tools in VS 2015 version 2 that contains web addins and VSTO templates as well.

Patterns and Practices in Building Office Add-ins from Mostafa Elzoghbi

Code Samples:
1) UPS Tracker Add-in on Github is here.
2) Using Yeoman Tool for building Office Add-ins: https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/runtimes/office


Enjoy!

Content was blocked because it was not signed by a valid security certificate when running Office Add-Ins

Hi All,

While i was developing an office add-in and using IE to view a deployed outlook add-in i was getting the following error:

Content was blocked because it was not signed by a valid security certificate.

It turns out that this issue is related to a self signed certificate that is being used on my local web server using gulp-webserver plugin; since i am using Visual Studio code in developing my office add-ins.

If you want to configure gulp server to use a certificate, open gulpfile.js in your project and add https to the configuration of gulp web server as explained here.

The other solution is to use chrome instead and not IE since IE requires self signed certificates to be added as a trusted certificate in your machine. So if you don't want to go through adding a self signed certificate to trusted certificates store, just use chrome and your add-in will load with no issues.

Hope this helps.

Office Add-Ins development best practices

Office Add-Ins development best practices

In this video i am covering office add-ins development best practices. The video covers how to provide clear value for Office add-ins, UX principles, market your add-in, publishing strategies, monitor and optimize add-in performance. The video is covering what you need to do from the inception phase of creating an add-in till publishing add-ins to your customers.

 

If you would like to get to know more about "The basics of office add-ins", i have posted earlier another video for that here:

https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/MostafaElzoghbi/Introduction-to-Office-Add-Ins

Enjoy!