VSTO 2005 Second Edition Released to Web - available for downloading

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 20:47:02 Z

I am very pleased to announce that Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Office System (VSTO 2005 SE) is released to web and is available for immediate downloading. The vision of VSTO is and has always been to make it a part of every developer’s toolkit. Toward that end, I’m excited to also announce that starting in Visual Studio Orcas, VSTO will be integrated into Visual Studio Professional and will support a substantially increased number of Office SKUs. This expands on the existing choices that developers currently have to get at the Office platform with VSTO including VS Team System and MSDN subscriptions.

The release of 2007 Office system introduces new levels of ease of use and user productivity. Soma’s blog discusses how the 2007 Office system is exciting for developers. This is the third release of VSTO and enables developers to efficiently and securely build solutions on the 2007 Office system.

This release reflects the growing and high demand in the market for Visual Studio Tools for Office by professional developers. Visual Studio Tools for Office in Visual Studio .NET 2003 provided some rudimentary support for building office applications with managed code. This evolved dramatically in Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office which included design-time and runtime support for building applications for Microsoft Office Excel, Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Office InfoPath and runtime support for Microsoft Outlook. For the first time, managed code developers could really take advantage of the power and flexibility of Microsoft Office with the full power of Visual Studio.

VSTO 2005 Second Edition extends this further by offering support for key 2007 Microsoft Office systems. Click here to see a brief demo of the functionality, including:

· Programming model and runtime support for the ribbon and custom task panes, and Outlook form regions and design-time support for InfoPath 2007 form templates.

· Application-level add-ins for Outlook 2007, Excel 2007, Word 2007, PowerPoint 2007, InfoPath 2007 and Visio 2007. Note that PowerPoint and Visio are new to this list – we heard tremendous customer feedback that developers wanted to be able to customize these applications.

· Support for Visual Studio 2005 Professional – the requests for this were overwhelming, and we’re proud to announce VS 2005 Pro support with this release.

The VSTO 2005 SE runtime also assures that the applications you’ve built on Office 2003 with VSTO 2005 continue to run with the 2007 Office system. This means that any development that you do against Office 2003 will continue to work as you upgrade to the 2007 Office system. Because we recognize that many developers and ISVs build for multiple platform environments, the new application-level add-in functionality will be offered down-level for Office 2003 as a part of VSTO 2005 SE.

I’m also pleased that this is a broadly available release. Anyone who has a licensed version of Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office, Visual Studio 2005 Professional, or Visual Studio Team System is eligible to download a free copy of VSTO 2005 SE. You can download your copy of VSTO 2005 SE today from this location on Microsoft.com/downloads.

I look forward to hearing your comments and feedback on VSTO 2005 SE.

KD Hallman

General Manager

Microsoft - Developer Division