Announcing Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Applications

Today at PDC05, Microsoft announced a new member to the Visual Studio family, Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Applications. Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA) enables you to deliver highly and easily customizable applications to your customers. VSTA is built on the .Net Framework 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005, supporting C# and VB customizations. 
VSTA contains a redistributable, simplified Visual Studio based integrated development environment (IDE). The IDE supports features such as IntelliSense, code tasks, samples, help and community integration. The IDE also supports the Windows Form designer and web service integration. VSTA debugging supports breakpoints, watch, auto, and locals windows. VSTA also supports running and debugging 64 bit customizations.
VSTA simplifies the loading and unloading of customizations/add-ins. It gives your application the control over the application domains that the add-in’s load into. VSTA gives the host application the flexibility to manage the add-ins in a way that is consistent and convenient for the host application. VSTA also supports macro recording and launching the IDE from the host application.
The VSTA SDK will be distributed as part of the VS SDK. The VSTA SDK will include docs, whitepapers, help, sample applications and redistributable components to help you integrate VSTA into your applications.
VSTA provides a rich .Net platform to create add-ins for your applications using C# and VB. You can now package the VSTA IDE with your application. As an application developer, you are now in control over how your add-ins are loaded.

Read more about Visual Studio Tools for Applications

-- Paul Stubbs

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