I am very interested in the technology behind office add-ins. I have learned a little about its history, and know about several technologies that can be used to develop add-ins.
1. Office.js
2. VSTO
3. COM Shim
4. COM
I don't have good knowledge of Shim, maybe I am wrong in making it a separate category. After getting the book on VSTO(the book was published in 2007), I tried how to develop an office add-in using VSTO. I also do some extra development, such as embedding the Chromium kernel, so that I can load web pages using Chromium, instead of the IE kernel(it doesn't have good support on the new web standards).
What makes me sad is that, for using VSTO, I have to install the new two libraries, one is the .net framework, and the other is vstor(vsto runtime). On some machines, I cannot install these libraries successfully, so I prepare to develop office add-ins(in my case, the Word add-in) using C++/COM. (I guess Office was constructed using COM, we can use pure C++ to develop an add-in not depending on other libraries.)
But the really hard part is that COM technology is not popular now (sorry for what is popular) and the method of how to develop office add-ins using COM is even lost! I cannot search for any useful information on this topic on the Microsoft website.
Everything needs a start, my aim is to create a task pane(I need this to load web pages later) using C++/COM, but now, I don't how to achieve this, so I ask this question here, wishing to get some help.