VSTO 2005 Second Edition (SE) Beta (codenamed "Cypress") has been released on the web. I had been working on some of the features for this product and let me briefly highlight some of the great features that we are offering:

• Addins - Excel 2003, Word 2003, Outlook 2003, Visio 2003 and PowerPoint 2003 - Complete design time support - its extremely easy to build office add-ins now. I know you're thinking what happened to Office 2007 - isn't that the main goal of the release? Well yeah, we have added support for all of the above 2007 applications and Infopath too!
• Application Level Task Panes or Custom Task pane support for Office 2007 - Actions task pane (doc-level), arguably being the most used VSTO feature, is now also available at application level. You don't have to wait to load a document to get great controls on the task pane. But won't it be great to have it to be context-sensitive and load on only certain types of documents eg. only on design specifications for Project X? Check out Andrew's post for the way to achieve this.
• Runtime support for Ribbon extensibility and Outlook form regions.
• Design-time support for InfoPath 2007 form templates - You can build your forms right inside Visual Studio. 
• Runtime support for Office 2007- All solutions developed for Office 2003 using VSTO 2005 will automatically work in Office 2007 after the runtime components included in VSTO 2006 Second Edition(SE)

We are offering these features not only for the VSTO 2005 SKU but also for anyone owning a VS Professional SKU. VS Professional SKU can now get access to the wealth of support for development for the Office platform. You can download the beta from here.This will work against Office 2007 Beta 2 TR.

Developers planning to work on the VSTO 2005 SE must read this great whitepaper by Andrew.

Posted using Windows Live Writer.