FIGURE 16.5The Upgrade Report for a VB 6 COM add-in, showing that the Access Designer was not upgraded.
The VB 6 COM add-in was the topic of Chapter 13.You might think that Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 (VSTO) would be an appropriate tool for
creating Access add-ins, when supplemented with the downloadable upgrade that supports Office
2007 — after all, Access is part of Office. But this is not so. Though you can create add-ins for all
the other major Office 2007 components, and some minor ones as well (see Figure 16.6), you can’t
create an Access add-in with VSTO, and therefore in this section I use Visual Studio 2005 for creat-
ing a Shared add-in (this is the new name for what was previously called a COM add-in).To create a Shared add-in that adds capability to Access, start by running Visual Studio 2005 and
selecting File➪New Project. In the New Project dialog, select the Extensibility selection under the
Other Project Types category, then select the Shared Add-in template. Enter the add-in’s name and
solution name; you can either accept the default location for the add-in’s files or browse for a cus-
tom location, as I did in Figure 16.7.CROCROSSSS-REF-REF
Customizing the Access Ribbon with a Visual Studio 2005 Shared Add-in 16