VSTO 2005 Second Edition Beta: Add-ins for Office 2007 and Office 2003
So the big announcement today--ok, excluding the announcement of Zune and Wii--is the availability of the Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical refresh and the beta of VSTO 2005 Second Edition (SE).
First of all, I'm currently using Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh in all my everyday work and it is pretty great. Now, you can also download VSTO 2005 SE and it installs right on top of VSTO 2005 and works with Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh so you can start developing against Office 2007.
Also (a brand new announcement today) VSTO 2005 SE will install on top of Visual Studio 2005 Professional. So if you have Professional and have felt left out (Professional didn't have any projects to target Office, only VSTO and VSTS) you can now install VSTO 2005 SE on top of your Professional install and start doing Office development today.
VSTO 2005 SE installs a bunch of projects that you can use for Office 2007 add-in development. You get Excel, InfoPath, Outlook, PowerPoint, Visio, and Word support.
Also (a brand new announcement today), VSTO 2005 SE has a bunch of new projects for Office 2003 add-in development as well.
If you are doing Office 2007 development, VSTO 2005 SE gives you easy support to develop application level task panes and ribbons. I will blog more about these features in the future.
For now, go check it out.
Download VSTO 2005 SE here:
Download Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh here:
https://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/getthebeta.mspx