Replicating Team System's “Open Selection in Microsoft Excel” functionality

Question

In Visual Studio, VSTS has the functionality to select a set of work items and click a button to open them in Excel, where you can modify them. Then, using the 'Team' ribbon, you can publish changes back to TFS.

We would like to replicate this functionality in a totally different business context. Does anyone know of any sample code or OSS project that does this sort of thing that we can leverage off?

I am specifically interested in how the templates are created and populated with data...

Answer 1

We ended up rolling it ourselves. Initially we used VSTO, but that was painful. Very. We switched to ExcelDna when they added Ribbon support and that has been great.