With VSTO 3.0 in Visual Studio 2008, there are a lot of new features and it can be a bit of a challenge to keep track of what’s enabled for what application.
The table below comes from my new book and shows the Office 2007 applications that are supported by VSTO 3.0 and the various VSTO features that are enabled for each Office application. In general, VSTO has the most features and support for Word, Excel, and Outlook.
VSTO 3.0 Features That Are Enabled For Each Office 2007 Application
Office Application
Document-Level Projects
Application-Level Add-in Projects
Data binding support
.NET Controls in the document
Document Level Task Panes
Application Level Task Panes
Visual Ribbon Designer
ClickOnce Deployment
Word 2007
X
Excel 2007
Outlook 2007
PowerPoint 2007
Visio 2007
InfoPath 2007
Project 2007
VSTO 3.0 has now been integrated directly into Visual Studio 2008 Professional and higher level SKUs where in the past it was only available as a standalone product or with Visual Studio Team System. Office programming is now available to more developers than ever before.
VSTO 3.0 also supports Office 2003 as shown in the following table. Note that Office 2003 does not have support for application level task panes or ribbons—these features are only available in Office 2007. Also note that we did not provide support for ClickOnce for Office 2003 development.
VSTO 3.0 Features That Are Enabled For Each Office 2003 Application
Word 2003
Excel 2003
Outlook 2003
PowerPoint 2003
Visio 2003
InfoPath 2003
Project 2003