Eric Carter and I are excited to announce that the Visual Basic edition of our book about Visual Studio Tools for Office is now available. I'd like to give a big thank-you to everyone who put their time, energy and enthusiasm behind this project, particularly my co-author (who, as always, did most of the heavy lifting.)

Visual Basic and Office programmability have gone together for a long time now and it was very important to us that we build a product that worked well for Office VBA programmers who want to move into the rich .NET world. It was therefore equally important that our book cover the particular needs of Visual Basic programmers. Sorting out whether we would have one book cover both C# and Visual Basic, or two books, and which one to do first was an agonizing process, but ultimately I think we made the right choices, and I'm thrilled with the result.

My only regret is that we couldn't make the title longer. I wanted it to be "Teach Yourself How To Build Professional Real-World Enterprise Solutions With Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2005 Tools For Microsoft Office System 2003 Using Microsoft Visual Basic 2006 With Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft InfoPath In Twenty-One Days In A Nutshell". Apparently that would have involved making the cover larger or infringing on a trademark or something, and it just wasn't feasible.

See Eric's recent blog post for more details about the book and where to download the code samples.