Introduction: Why Add-in Express?

MS Office 2000 introduced a unified add-in architecture based on Component Object Model (COM). COM add-ins promise the ability to write a single component that will run across the entire Office suite of applications. There are many benefits of building a COM add-in. You develop and maintain a single code base for the add-in, and Office applications get a common functionality extension that appears built-in. A COM Add-In is an OLE Automation server (an ActiveX DLL) that implements the IDTExensibility2 interface as described in Microsoft Add-In Designer Type Library. All COM add-ins inherit from this interface and must implement each of its five methods.

Add-in Express is a VCL-library designed to simplify the development of COM add-ins. Add-in Express hides all straits of low-level development while implementing the IDTExtensibility2 interface. Add-in Express provides GUI management including the creation of CommandBar and CommandBarsControl objects. Besides, Add-in Express preserves basic approaches of Delphi development that enables the use of all Delphi forms and controls and Delphi components inside Add-in.

Examples

To aid you in learning how to use Add-in Express, several examples are included in the installation package. All the examples that you see in this tutorial are collected in several demo projects that can be found in the \QDemo subfolder of the Add-in Express installation folder. These projects include samples corresponding to chapters of the tutorial. All the samples are COM add-ins for Microsoft Excel.

Add-in Express Setup

The Add-in Express Setup procedure description can be found in readme.txt contained in the Add-in Express package.

Support

Please email any questions or comments to addinxp@AfalinaSoft.com. But first, always check AfalinaSoft.com/Support where you will find the latest news, FAQ, and tips and tricks sections. You can find a lot of answers to you questions here. To get our latest news by email, click here or subscribe directly at AfalinaSoft.com. You can find the latest release of the software at AfalinaSoft.com Downloads.