Professional Visual Studio® 2008

33.1. Choosing an Office Project Type

The types of applications you can create using VSTO under Visual Studio have come a long way with the latest version. You now have the ability to create add-in applications for almost every product in the Office suite. Furthermore, these solutions can either be attached to a single document, or be loaded every time that application is launched.

You can create a new Office application by selecting File New Project. Select your preferred language (Visual Basic or Visual C#), and then select the Office project category, as shown in Figure 33-1.

It is technically possible to create Office applications using .NET languages besides Visual Basic or Visual C#. However, you will lose the benefits of the project and item templates and designer support provided by Visual Studio. Though it might be a good academic exercise to try creating an Outlook add-in using IronRuby, it will also be a lot more work.

Visual Studio 2008 provides templates for both Office 2003 and Office 2007. The same projects can be created under both versions of Office, with the addition of SharePoint and InfoPath under Office 2007.

Figure 33.1. Figure 33-1

The project templates can ...