Office 2007 Gets Visual Studio Tools

In sync with today's public release of the Office 2007 Beta 2
Technical Refresh, the Developer Tools division at Microsoft has made
available the first public beta of the second edition of Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005.

You
might be thinking, "I don't remember an 'Office 2005."' Actually, think
of this as "VSTO 2005," the second edition of the tools dated last
year, that enables Visual Studio development directly for Office 2003
and Office 2007.

In a now-bygone era, the runtime development language for Office
was Visual Basic for Applications. Now that the .NET Framework provides
services for Office, developers want to be able to use the full-fledged
Visual Studio to build tools not just with Visual Basic, but using any
language the CLR recognizes, including C#.

BetaNews tested an earlier
build of the VSTO at TechEd in Boston last June, where we experimented
with such features as adding new command groups to the ribbon in Word
2007.

Using the new version of VSTO, developers will be able to
create add-ins for Office 2007 applications using fully managed code.
This code can interact directly with Office apps using its type
library, so the code has access to the content of documents and
worksheets. And developers will be able to design forms and user
interface elements for add-ins using the familiar Visual Studio
environment.

Admins should then be able, Microsoft said last
June, to create installation images of Office that can be deployed
throughout an enterprise network, and which actually include the custom
add-ins by default.

An MSDN forum post
by VSTO developer K.D. Hallman today acknowledged that the new beta
does have one prominently missing feature: a designer environment for
Office's new ribbon controls.

"A visual designer would be
consistent with the toolset philosophy and reasonable to expect,"
Hallman wrote. "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."