Visual Studio 2005 Tools for 2007 Office System Released!

Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Office System (VSTO 2005 SE) is released to web.  This announcement was publically made during the keynote at Tech Ed in Barcelona Spain.  VSTO 2005 SE is immediately available to the developer community for downloading.

So whats new in it for you..? well ..This is the third release of VSTO. Visual Studio Tools for Office 2003 shipped with Office 2003 and provided rudimentary support for building office applications with managed code and the adoption was impressive. The functionality 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 introductory support for Microsoft Outlook and shipped last November with Visual Studio 2005.  For the first time, professional developers could really take advantage of the power and flexibility of Microsoft Office with the full power of Visual Studio.This is also announced that starting in Visual Studio Orcas, VSTO will be integrated into VS Professional and will support a substantially increased number of Office SKUs(does that mean you'l' be able to use it with standard edition of office? I don't know !!).

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

· 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 download the final VSTO 2005 SE build here: https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=5E86CAB3-6FD6-4955-B979-E1676DB6B3CB&displaylang=en