Multiple Ribbons in Outlook Addin

Question

I have an Outlook addin where I need to display a ribbon in the main Outlook window and in the Mail Read window as well. To do this I have added two ribbon xml files with the right markups in them. I then added a C# class that implements the Office.IRibbonExtensibility interface where I have implemented the GetCustomUI method which returns the right XML. Finally I did this in the ThisAddIn.cs class

protected override Office.IRibbonExtensibility CreateRibbonExtensibilityObject()
        {
            try
            {


                _ribbon = new Ribbon();
                return _ribbon;
            }
            catch (Exception e)
            {

            }
            return null;
        }

So far so good. The ribbons load and everything shows in correct place.

Now the problem is that this Ribbon.cs file is getting rather huge as all the callbacks live in this file. Is there a way to split the callbacks into multiple classes? So if I have a Ribbon1.xml and RIbbon2.xml can I have equivalent Ribbon1.cs and Ribbon2.cs?

Answer 1

OK so as it turns out this is really not possible in the VSTO model. You can really only have one class which must have all the event handlers in it. The recommended approach is to use partial classes and split the code between multiple code files.