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I've got a VSTO3 Word addin that makes use of custom ribbons and taskbars, etc.

Now, Office 2010 comes along and there's this nifty new BACKSTAGE concept, which I'd like to hook into. However, from what I can tell, doing it with VSTO requires Vsto 4, which requires VS2010, which isn't an option.

Soooo. I started looking online and have found all sorts of examples of, essentially, piggybacking the backstage XML onto whatever Ribbon xml I define and returning that as the value of GetCustomUI. All good, except if you're using VSTO3, there doesn't appear to be any way to "hook" into the call chain for GetCustomUI. It's all "automagically" handled for you by the OfficeRibbon and RibbonManage classes.

I know I +COULD+ convert the addin to a shared addin and just implement the IDTExtensibility interfaces directly. I'd lose all the vsto goodness (yeah, that's debatable) but I'd gain access to the GetCustomUI call.

Anyone every tried to get access to GetCustomUI +WHILE+ using VSTO though? Is it even possible?

I thought I could create a wrapper class for RibbonManager, but lo, MS has gone and done what looks to be some supreme violation of encapsulation. The RibbonManager implements the nice and easy IRibbonExtensibility interface, and yet, where that interface is passed around, they actually check the passed object to be sure it's of the actual type RibbonManager! Ugh, so much for any kind of wrapper.

Deduplicator
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DarinH
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2 Answers2

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If you want to edit XML ribbon at runtime in a VSTO app, I have created a simple solution here: Outlook 2007 ribbon customization in .NET using VS2010; insertBeforeMso dynamic function

Community
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kmanxi
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Turns out it's possible, just not easy. You have to override the CreateRibbonExtensibilityObject method on connect, as well as the CreateRibbonObjects, and the RequestService methods.

Then, you have to create an object that wraps the built in VSTO RibbonManager object, and implements iReflect to intercept reflection INVOKE calls and forward them on to the underlying RibbonManager.

Finally, on the interceptor object, you have to also implement IRibbonExtensibility, then code up the GetCustomUI method of that interface.

once you do all that, your GetCustomUI will be called and passed in the full XML of the ribbons you've defined via VSTO, which you can then alter directly (in my case I needed to add backstage support), and then return that xml from the function.

definitely not straightforward, but it works.

DarinH
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