The trinity team(VSTO/VSTA team in MS) announced "Cypress", a fully-supported add-on to Visual Studio 2005 which will give developers the ability to build applications targeting the 2007 version of Office.
Specific Cypress functionality includes:
Number #1 customer requested feature: application-level add-ins for the most popular Office applications including Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, InfoPath and Visio
Office key feature support: programming model and runtime support for Ribbon, Custom Task Panes, and Outlook forms regions. Design-time support will follow in Visual Studio "Orcas"
Cypress will also ensure that applications built on Office 2003 with VSTO 2005 continue to run with 2007 version of Office, facilitating enterprise deployments. Cypress is a date-driven release and will ship concurrent with the 2007 version of Office later this year.
This will provide customers with the first class developer tools in Visual Studio and provides the update of tools needed to target the Office release. This replaces the existing plan to have a beta version of VSTO "Orcas" with a "go-live" license available at the October launch. Cypress will be a fully supported Visual Studio product.
-Suresh
