Give me 5 Lbs of VSTO

I have been following Eric Lippert‘s blog for a bit, but I had not realized that he had co-authored a book on VSTO with Eric Carter until the second edition came out recently. I needed a good reference book on VSTO, so I went ahead and purchased it. And because the second edition is focused exclusively on Office 2007, but a good part of my VSTO work revolves around Excel 2003, I figured I might as well get the first edition, too.

I received my package from Amazon 2 days ago, and I must say, this is massive. As in, about 2000 pages total. I began skimming though, and so far I really like it. I have been learning VSTO mostly by grabbing pieces of knowledge here and there, and as a result my understanding lacks a bit of cohesion – which is where a book usually helps, by providing a comprehensive and structured approach to a topic. A friend of mine asked me today if I planned to read it all: probably not all in detail, but I’ll try to skim through everything. You don’t know what you don’t know, and glancing at everything quickly can prove surprisingly helpful.