Professional Visual Basic® 2010 and .NET 4

Chapter 25. Visual Studio Tools for Office

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER

• VSTO releases and Office Automation

• Office business application architecture

• VBA-VSTO interop

• Creating a document template (Word)

• Creating an Office add-in (Excel)

• Outlook form regions

This chapter introduces the Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) project templates. VSTO was originally available as an add-in to Visual Studio for several releases, and then became part of the core product with Visual Studio 2008. Visual Studio 2010 continues to include it as part of the standard installation of all versions of Visual Studio Professional and above. The VSTO package isn't so much a set of new menus as it is templates and DLLs that enable you to integrate custom business logic into Microsoft Office products.

VSTO was somewhat neglected in the .NET development world prior to Visual Studio 2008. The main Office client applications that most people think about targeting, Word and Excel, have supported customization through Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) since long before .NET. Visual Studio 2008 expanded the list of supported applications, and support for customization of the full Office System, including SharePoint, continues with the latest version of Visual Studio, which enables full-featured Office Business Application (OBA) development.

This chapter focuses on using Visual Studio 2010 with the Office 2010 Beta — the existing code demos for Office 2007 released with Professional Visual Basic 2008 are still ...