Visual Basic® 2010 Unleashed

Introducing the Visual Studio Tools for Office

Building custom add-ins for Microsoft Office is possible due to the Visual Studio Tools for Office components (also called VSTO for brevity). VSTO are a set of tools integrated into Visual Studio 2010 that provide project templates, assemblies, and instruments related to the Office development. In Visual Studio 2010, VSTO provides support for building customizations for the most recent versions of Microsoft Office, such as 2003, 2007, and 2010 (see note at the beginning of this chapter). VSTO relies on a special redistributable runtime known as VSTO Runtime that is required to run your add-ins on target machines. Later in this chapter you see how to include such runtime in distributions. VSTO are ...