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."