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
May 15th, 2005 at 3:06 pm
so you were right!!!
I’m still wait for mine, even though i got :
Items in your order for Microsoft products were shipped today.
Order For: Visual Studio 2005 Profesional Edition Beta
Order Number: 01205007394194
Order Date: April 26, 2005
hummmm? are they coming form the states!
I’ll need to get a copy 03 aswell!
May 15th, 2005 at 6:11 pm
The return address is Grove City ohio, not sure if yours ship from there or not.
May 16th, 2005 at 3:02 am
btw. I also got antoher DVD - WeFly247
May 16th, 2005 at 5:23 pm
They shorted me on the WeFly DVD… did I miss anything?
May 16th, 2005 at 11:39 pm
Strange … WeFly DVD was in the package with other DVDs .. Maybe they are sending WeFly only to Slovenia
August 17th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
[...] very cool to post about recieving VSTO a few days ago and getting a personal email from a Microsoft employee, with some tips on where to [...]