Announcing Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Applications

Today at PDC05 they announced a new product that I have been working on for the last 2 years. So it is exciting for me to be able to finally share with you all what I have been working on.

Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA) is a .NET-based application customization technology designed to be embedded into applications to enable developers to create custom experiences on top of those applications.  It offers a full-featured interactive development environment (IDE), design-time, runtime and supports both VB.Net and C#.  This means that partners, typically ISVs, can license the VSTA engine and integrate it into their applications so that their customers can customize their applications using .NET programming techniques.  VSTA notably offers a significantly advanced environment for application customization and extensibility and is the result of over five years of effort and broad industry feedback.  Office 12 is using VSTA for application customization in InfoPath.  Also, we announced our first four external partners for VSTA at PDC.

Check out the new VSTA team blog for more information. Also I will be posting more detailed information about the inner workings of VSTA here on my blog.

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