I'm pleased to announce that the official Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012 is now available to download ! For VSTO developers, this release brings .NET 4.5 support and design-time support for Office 2013, along with general design-time enhancements...

UPDATE FROM MARCH 06, 2013: We heard your feedback! With the latest release of the Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012 , you no longer need to manually create a bootstrapper package. Just make sure to enable the bootstrapper under the "Publish"...

In order to provide a more integrated experience for folks building custom solutions on the Office platform, we’ve merged the content from the VSTO Developer Center into the Office Developer Center . You’ll still find great learning content there including...

If you missed it, last week the InfoPath team posted about how to migrate your InfoPath projects from Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 or Visual Studio Tools for Office 2008 (VSTO) into InfoPath 2010 using Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA...

Signing your Office solutions with a certificate is a mandatory step, but there are several optional steps that can change the way the certificate is presented to the end user or customer. This example uses a Visual Studio generated test certificate,...

With the SP1 work winding down, I thought that I’d take a moment and discuss three new performance improvements that are going into VSTO for SP1. We have listened to your feedback and understand that startup time is a major issue, and so we have...

Paul O’Rear, a Program Manager on the Library Experience team, describes the changes to the Microsoft Help Viewer planned for Visual Studio 2010 SP1. He demonstrates the new functionality of the viewer in an early build of Help Viewer 1.1. See Microsoft...

You have probably been reading and hearing about Microsoft Office 2010 for some months. Now, you may be wondering how much work is necessary to install your existing Office 2007/VSTO 3.0 solutions on customer computers that have Office 2010. Perhaps you...

Today we released the Microsoft Office 2010 Primary Interop Assemblies (PIA) Bootstrapper Installer which adds the Microsoft Office 2010 Primary Interop Assemblies to the Prerequisites Dialog Box in Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Studio 2008. Then when...

In Visual Studio 2010, you can use the ClickOnce and Windows Installer deployment technologies to deploy Office solutions that target both Microsoft Office 2007 and Microsoft Office 2010. The main advantage of using Windows Installer to deploy your Office...

In this interview, I sit down with Stephen Peters , a developer on the Office client tools team in Visual Studio. Steve shows us a couple of tricks for how you can squeeze the best performance out of Office solutions built with Visual Studio (VSTO). He...

A customer on the VSTO forums recently noticed that the steps we blogged about for sharing a single Ribbon customization between multiple projects in Visual Studio 2008 no longer works in Visual Studio 2010. When following the instructions in the blog...

We are happy to announce that today we are releasing the Open XML Package Editor Power Tool for Visual Studio 2010 on Visual Studio Gallery . This Power Tool is a Visual Studio add-in that provides an easy way to parse and edit Open Packaging Conventions...

We have helped many developers in troubleshooting VSTO add-in load failures. Hamed has written a very nice blog post explaining the basic steps to troubleshoot VSTO add-in load failures. Even if you have not faced this issue yet, I recommend reading the...

Managed Office add-ins traditionally have been able to run in the targeted application (the version of the application whose PIAs the add-in references) and in later versions of the application. Therefore, if you need to create a single VSTO add-in that...

It is very easy to customize the Ribbon in your VSTO extension.  All you need to do is to add a Ribbon (Visual Designer) to your solution, and it will appear when your solution is run without needing to do any more work.  Behind the scenes,...

Now that Visual Studio 2010 is released, some of you might be itching to upgrade your existing VSTO projects so that you can take advantage of the new features in the .NET Framework 4 that improve the Office development experience . Or, you might have...

Aaron wrote a great article about the VSTO runtime components earlier, which explained the Office extensions for .NET Framework 3.5 and Office extensions for .NET Framework 4. He also explained that starting in Microsoft Office 2010, the Visual Studio...

Office solutions for .NET Framework 4 have dependencies on files that are distributed in the Visual Studio 2010 Tools for Office runtime, but there are also files outside of the runtime that are required for Office solutions to run on end-user computers...

Recently I helped two customers that were trying to solve this problem. They wanted to get notifications whenever Excel sorted or filtered data. This is not as easy as it sounds because Excel does not raise any events for sorting and filtering. I found...

I was chatting with some of my friends about Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4 and they asked me why should they move their application to .Net Framework 4, I am answering the question here for everybody to benefit. Frankly speaking there is no...

The first thing that you notice after opening your existing projects in Visual Studio 2010 is the very familiar Visual Studio Conversion wizard. Internally we call it Project Migration wizard. Personally I love this wizard because of its simplicity, my...

On Monday, the VSTO team released a Whitepaper documenting how to get your VSTO customizations building in a Team Build environment. No longer will you need to install Visual Studio on your build machine in order to accommodate building VSTO projects...

Whooo hooooo! It’s been ~2 years in the making but Visual Studio 2010 has been released ! This is my first full product cycle since I started Microsoft and oh what a ride! I’ve been watching live interviews from the Vegas launch event all day on Channel...

Nathan Halstead is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Team. He is responsible for various aspects of Visual Studio extensibility, and is an avid ice hockey enthusiast. On occasion, he’s been known to guest author technical articles on various Microsoft...