VSTO 2005 SE Beta (a.k.a. “Cypress”) is now available!!
Locked
I’m very pleased to announce the beta release of Visual Studio Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System (Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Second Edition Beta, or VSTO 2005 SE Beta for short), a fully-supported, free add-on to Visual Studio 2005 that empowers developers to build applications targeting the 2007 Microsoft Office system. My June post announced our intent to provide this release, and now in this post, a short three months later, I’m announcing availability of the VSTO 2005 SE Beta in a coordinated release with the 2007 Office beta 2 refresh. I’ll also provide additional information on the features, how to get the beta, and how to communicate with the engineering team about your experience with it so we can continue to improve it in preparation for final release later this year.
The 2007 Office system is a powerful development platform upon which to build business applications, providing a wide array of new features that developers can leverage to help make their users even more productive than ever before. From the new ribbon and custom task pane to SharePoint services, developers can now build applications with more robust user interfaces and collaborative features. VSTO 2005 SE gives developers the power to take advantage of the 2007 Office System as a development platform and create scalable Office-based solutions.
VSTO 2005 SE Beta includes the following functionality:
· Managed code application-level add-ins for some of the most popular Office applications: Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, InfoPath and Visio. Safe loading, unloading, and management of managed add-ins continues to be the #1 most requested feature for VSTO, and I’m proud that we’ve been able to provide this functionality to developers much earlier than we anticipated. I’m also proud that we were able to add support for PowerPoint and Visio, which were two Office applications that were most requested by our customers and developer community.
« New: This functionality is also now available for Office 2003!
· Support for key Office 2007 features: programming model and runtime support for the ribbon, custom task panes, and Outlook form regions.
· Design-time support for InfoPath 2007 form templates, which means that you can build your forms right inside Visual Studio.
· Compatibility and maintainability assurances: the VSTO 2005 SE Beta assures that the applications you’ve built on Office 2003 with VSTO 2005 continue to run with the 2007 Office system.
· New: VSTO 2005 SE Beta now runs in Visual Studio 2005 Professional (stand-alone), in addition to those versions already supported, including all the MSDN subscriptions and Visual Studio Team System.
Anyone who has a licensed version of Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office or Visual Studio Professional and above (either standalone versions or via an MSDN Premium or Professional subscription) is eligible to download a free copy of VSTO 2005 SE Beta. You can download the VSTO 2005 SE Beta from this site: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=5012A573-0D84-4E39-983C-CA22F2107B07&displaylang=en. You can get the 2007 Office beta 2 refresh from this site: http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/getthebeta.mspx
And since I have your attention, I’d like to take just a moment to let you know what is on the VSTO roadmap after VSTO 2005 SE. After you begin working with VSTO 2005 SE Beta, you’ll likely discover that there is not a visual designer for the ribbon, custom task pane or Outlook forms region. We would love to have provided these. A visual designer would be consistent with the toolset philosophy and reasonable to expect. However, since you are likely a developer reading this, you understand the trade-off of time vs. scope. Based on the feedback we received from our developer community regarding the importance of providing VSTO tools that worked at the same time as the release of the 2007 Office system, we committed ourselves to providing what was possible in the shortest timeframe possible. Therefore, you can anticipate that visual designers for these features are on the roadmap for a future release. VSTO 2005 also enabled many additional scenarios for the Office 2003 system that aren’t supported for the 2007 Office System in the VSTO 2005 SE release, for example document based add-ins. I encourage you to watch for an upcoming CTP of “Orcas” and check out the VSTO features – you will be quite excited to see what’s in the oven.
Also, be sure to keep tabs on VSTO 2005 SE in the VSTO Developer Portal. Here you’ll find links to blogs, technical articles, the forum, and various downloads.
As always, we greatly appreciate and are very interested in your feedback. Please report product quality errors on Microsoft Connect or post questions here to this VSTO Forum. You can be assured that you’re communicating directly with members of our team when you provide your thoughts and comments about our product.
Thanks so much for helping us make the best products we possibly can for you!
K.D. Hallman
General Manager
Office Platform Developer Tools
Microsoft Corporation
