VSTO 2005 Second Edition RTW

Yesterday we announced the availability of VSTO 2005 Second Edition for Office 2007.  This is now available as a web download: https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=5E86CAB3-6FD6-4955-B979-E1676DB6B3CB&displaylang=en

Crucially this not only provides new features for Office 2007 development, but also offers enhancements for Office 2003 development as well:  

· Programming model and runtime support for the ribbon, 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!

You can see a brief video demo of the new functionality here.