As you may remember, I asked last year whether C# programmers are masochists for using C# to program against the Office model since VB deals with COM much better in a number of cases. My comment was prompted by the publication of Eric Lippert’s and Eric Carter’s book “Visual Studio Tools For Office Using C# with Word, Excel, Outlook and InfoPath.” Well, now you don’t have to be a masochist any more! You can read “Visual Studio Tools For Office Using Visual Basic 2005 with Excel, Word, Outlook and InfoPath”. As Eric Carter says:

This edition of the book focuses on using the Visual Basic 2005 language to program against Office.  Visual Basic is a much easier language to use for Office development than the C# language.  The Visual Basic language and the Office object models “grew up” together over the years and as a result the Visual Basic language deals much more easily with features of the Office object models like optional parameters and loose typing than C# does.  If you compare the Visual Basic edition of this book to the C# edition you will often find the code samples are simpler than the C# samples because of the way Visual Basic simplifies calling the Office object models.

 Check it out!