VSTO 3.0 Features – What Features For What Office Applications?

With VSTO 3.0 in Visual Studio 2008, there are a lot of new features and it can be a bit of a challenge to keep track of what’s enabled for what application.

The table below comes from my new book and shows the Office 2007 applications that are supported by VSTO 3.0 and the various VSTO features that are enabled for each Office application. In general, VSTO has the most features and support for Word, Excel, and Outlook.

VSTO 3.0 Features That Are Enabled For Each Office 2007 Application

VSTO 3.0 has now been integrated directly into Visual Studio 2008 Professional and higher level SKUs where in the past it was only available as a standalone product or with Visual Studio Team System. Office programming is now available to more developers than ever before.

VSTO 3.0 also supports Office 2003 as shown in the following table.  Note that Office 2003 does not have support for application level task panes or ribbons—these features are only available in Office 2007.  Also note that we did not provide support for ClickOnce for Office 2003 development.

VSTO 3.0 Features That Are Enabled For Each Office 2003 Application