My 2005 Visual Studio arrived with 3 CD’s: Team Suite, Team Server, and SQL Server 2005, very nice.

During the FULL install of Team Suite the text said “Installing Visual Studio Tools for Microsoft Office”. So what is it? Basically it’s not a seperate IDE or program, it’s just the option to start a new project in Visual Studio as “New Workbook” and you’re programming in VSTO.

There is a toolbox full of controls to drop onto your workbook and program, like TaskPanes, Progress Bars, Treeviews, and the usual controls.

I’m not sure how to program most of them in DotNet yet, but within 10 minutes I had a TaskPane with a picture in it added to the workbook, awesome. The IDE is for sure a step up from VBA, Screenshot.

Just a guess, one major drawback is going to be deployment, or most workbooks developed with VSTO won’t run “stand-alone” on most machines: after a half hour of researching I couldn’t figure out how to run a workbook outsided of the development environment maybe? or maybe?. I didn’t even attempt to run a VSTO workbook on a machine without VSTO.

I’ve started a new category called VSTO/DotNet. Any tinkering I do I’ll post there.

Thanks MS. And two related links:

Common Tasks in Office Programming

VSTO Blog