VSTO Cypress: Full Support for Office 2007!
If you're a VSTO developer looking to get a head-start on Office 2007 development, life has been complicated lately because the available versions of VSTO didn't support Office 2007. Well, as of yesterday life got simpler with the release of "Cypress," a a free add-on for Visual Studio 2005 that enables you to build VSTO solutions for the 2007 Microsoft Office System.
The VSTO team blog has all the details here. There's also a very informative video on Channel 9 that my colleague Christin Boyd helped put together, in which KD Hallman and Eric Carter talk about what this release means for the future of VSTO development.
Cypress includes application-level add-ins for Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, InfoPath and Visio, as well as programming model and runtime support for the ribbon, custom task panes, and Outlook forms regions.
Why the name Cypress? I haven't heard the official reasoning, but it's interesting to note that Cypress Island (in Washington's beautiful San Juan Islands) is located roughly between Orcas Island and Whidbey Island. Oh, and Whidbey was the code-name for the last release of Visual Studio, while Orcas is the code-name for the next/upcoming release of VS. Hmm.
