Okay, I've been out for a couple of days, taking some time after shipping Office 2007 and getting ready for another product delivery (our second child, a girl, due anytime).

While I was busy getting baby stuff out of storage, the rest of the company kept busy shipping great products for 2007.  Here's the rollup with links of everything that came out over the past couple of days:

Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Second Edition

VSTO 2005 SE is a fully-supported free add-on to Visual Studio 2005 that enables developers to build applications on the 2007 Office System.  This is really great, the folks in VSTO stepped up and got this Second Edition out just in time for Office 2007.  Here are some highlights of the functionality:

  • Application-level add-in support for the most popular 2007 Office System applications including Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, InfoPath and Visio, and provides safe loading/unloading and easy management of managed add-ins.
  • Design-time and runtime support for key 2007 Office System features such as the Ribbon, Custom Task Panes, and Outlook forms regions.
  • NOTE: There are no visual designers for these features in this release.
  • Design-time support for InfoPath 2007 form templates
  • Maintainability and compatibility assurances. VSTO 2005 SE ensures that the applications customers have built on Office 2003 with VSTO 2005 continue to run with 2007 Office system.
  • The ability to run in Visual Studio 2005 Professional.
  • Expanded application-level add-in support for these Office 2003 Standard and Professional applications: Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Visio.
  • VSTO 2005 SE Setup allows you to install VSTO 2005 SE on Microsoft Vista.

Go get it and start building some great CTP solutions!

.NET Framework 3.0

In this released build of .NET 3.0, you will find the System.IO.Packaging namespace in the windowsbase.dll assembly.  This is Microsoft's offering to enable developers to write applications against the Office Open XML file formats. 

Windows Vista

Yes, you heard it right, Vista has shipped, it's finally here.