52.8. Shared Add-Ins
Besides Visual Studio add-ins you have another type of add-in called the shared add-in. Shared add-ins let you build add-ins for Microsoft Office products in a way similar to building an add-in for the Visual Studio IDE.
You can create shared add-in projects by choosing the Shared Add-in project template in the New Project dialog in Visual Studio and passing the same wizard that you saw for Visual Studio add-ins. In general, there aren't many differences between Visual Studio add-ins and shared add-ins. One of the differences is in the name and the numbers of host applications for a shared add-in. The generated code and development process for shared add-ins is similar to Visual Studio add-ins, but to develop a shared add-in you need to use Microsoft Office APIs rather than the automation model and the DTE.
However, because this book targets Visual Studio, we won't go any further into the topic of shared add-ins. You should be able to get started with them just by having this background in Visual Studio add-ins.
