About Customization, Automation, Addins and Life
I'm the architect on the team in the Visual Studio division that deals with application programmability. Of course, Microsoft's biggest application suite (Office if I needed to say it) is our first customer. We produce the Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System (VSTO) product to customize Office with managed code. VSTO is being built upon a common application programmability platform -- and product -- that we have dubbed VSTA: Visual Studio Tools for Applications. VSTA is sometimes described as "managed VBA" but it is much more than that. Hopefully this blog will help fill this gap in. And VSTA is built upon a generic "Addin" platform being integrated into .NET currently called the Managed Addin Framework (MAF). This blog contains posts on all of these topics, plus general .NET programming topics that come into play when building addin or automation models.
Where does "Life" come into it? Well, beyond the fact that my life is consumed by my work, life is all about adapting and customizing, and the ability to build customization in to make adaptation easier. Life is an Addin Model.
