ArtLeo's WebLog

I need some reassurance that Office 2007 will be compatible with solutions created in VSTO 2005 for Office 2003 before I deploy VSTO 2005 applications for Excel 2003. From what I have read, it seems that is the goal. Has the goal been reached? If so, will there be a need to revise, rebuild and re-deploy VSTO 2005 solutions to work in Excel 2007?

We've considered writing managed add-ins w/o VSTO, but have so far not done it. That is mainly owing to non-technical barriers, but issues around PIAs also make me uncomfortable. The company I work for currently has a COM add-in written in C++ that works in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, for both Office XP and Office 2003. The business logic is identical for all three applications, so we've got a single DLL with an abstraction layer for the application object model differences. We use the Office 10 type library, which is maybe inappropriate (?), but for the subset of the object model we use, it has been compatible on both Office versions. In the near future, we'll probably want to target Office 2007 as well. The reasons we wouldn't use VSTO are: 1. No VSTO for PowerPoint. 2. No VSTO for Office XP. 3. VSTO seems to be for document-centric solutions, but what we're doing is really an extension of the application that needs to work with all documents. For a non-VSTO approach, I'm not sure how to set up my development environment such that the productivity benefits of having .NET won't be obliterated by needing three sets of PIAs (which require the correct Office version to be installed as well) and three DLL projects that reference each. I guess, as you've mentioned in another post, the 2003 PIAs will work with 2007, but it's likely that we'll need to do some UI customization for 2007 which will invalidate our v.10 type library trick anyway. It would be great if there were some guidance about how to set all this up in a development environment that is sufficiently productive that you don't want to shoot yourself at the end of each day. I suppose that's the point of VSTO, but it is too limited for our needs.