VSTA RTM's with the 2007 Office System

Published 10 November 06 07:07 AM | VSTABlog 
 

I am excited to announce that Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA) was released as an integrated component of the 2007 Office system earlier this week and is available to both Office developers and ISVs! 

 

As Microsoft's future direction in application extensibility, VSTA provides a powerful customization toolset for ISVs, their customers, and their partners. Leveraging Visual Studio and .NET to provide managed extensibility, VSTA enables innovative customization scenarios while offering new levels of security and control. VSTA accelerates and simplifies the development of tailored solutions, helping ISVs grow their partner ecosystems and extend their market reach.  By integrating VSTA into their applications, ISVs give their customers a managed environment for tailoring applications to specific business needs.  Within VSTA, multiple configuration options offer ISVs deep control over the customization experience, and new technologies make it possible to develop more reliable, version-resilient extensions.  You can think of it as the modern, scalable, and more secure version of VBA. 

 

This first release of VSTA makes numerous improvements over the VBA experience and includes many of the beloved VBA favorites.  Perhaps the feature most applauded by enterprise BDMs and SI’s is that VSTA customizations are seamlessly opened by any version of Visual Studio enabling professional developers to continue to enhance applications originally created by end user developers – a feature requested by many enterprises because applications often grow in sophistication over time.

 

A brief rundown of this feature packed release of VSTA includes:

 

       Leverages the innovative Visual Studio (VS) toolset

       Multi-language support – VB and C#

       Macro Recoding

       Windows Forms designer

       IntelliSense & Code Tasks

       End-user debugging features: breakpoints, watch/auto/locals windows

       Supports connected systems development

       Web services-based development

       Fully leverages the .NET Framework

       Running and debugging 32-bit and 64-bit add-ins

       Running partial trusted add-ins

       Client and Server programming

       Common VSTA/VSTO runtime architecture for seamless up-leveling of solutions

       Graduated host integration capabilities – “use what you need when you need it”

       Low barrier to entry – get started in about two days

       Add more functionality as desired/needed over time

       Runs side x side with VBA

       Add-in Management

       Simplifies loading and unloading of add-ins

       Ability to manage application domain creation

       Host defined discovery and qualification supporting repository based scenarios

       VSTA SDK includes

       Redistributable VS based IDE and Runtime

       Integration tools

       Samples and walk throughs

       Help documentation

 

Find out more about VSTA here, including how to download the VSTA SDK and learn about the simplified and transparent ISV pricing model.

 

Happy Customization!

 

KD Hallman

General Manager

Microsoft - Developer Division

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# Paul Stubbs said on November 10, 2006 10:29 AM:

Now that VSTA has RTM’d (See KD Hallman’s announcement at http://blogs.msdn.com/vsta ) I would like to

# Excited developer said on November 18, 2006 12:48 PM:

This is really cool, I can't wait to start using this in my apps.

One quick question though:

I downloaded beta versions of the SDK and wasn't able to find the redistributable VS based IDE. Was that a late addition? Where can i get the full version?

# DT said on November 21, 2006 10:34 AM:

For Office 2007 or Infopath Only?  I'm testing the just released Office 2007 Professional Plus and Excel stills pulls VBA from the Developers Tab.

Only Infopath have a shorcut to VSTA.

# em said on January 22, 2007 4:37 AM:

KD Hallman wrote "VSTA was released as an integrated component of the 2007 Office system earlier this week and is available to both Office developers and ISVs!". It seems, that she is the only one, who knows how to use VSTA in Office 2007 and she is keeping this knowledge perfectly secret!

# wilfis said on January 29, 2007 11:02 AM:

Microsoft has integrated VSTA into the InfoPath 2007 application, which is part of these editions of Microsoft Office:

- Office Ultimate 2007

- Office Professional Plus 2007

- Office Enterprise 2007

If you have one of these editions of Office 2007, you'll still have to do a bit of configuration to get VSTA working inside InfoPath.

Here's a blog post by Gary Depue of Summit Software that walks you through the process of configuring VSTA to work within InfoPath 2007:

http://www.summsoft.com/blogs/garyvsta/archive/2006/07/26/Finding-and-Using-VSTA-in-InfoPath-2007.aspx

# Ivan said on February 26, 2007 8:14 AM:

Somebody please explain me where will the VB.NET/C# code go when I deploy a workbook.

Will it be inside the workbook or in another file.

Can I deploy a workbook without source code (like Access MDE) or with source code in a DLL?

# zalupa said on March 1, 2007 4:27 PM:

hello world http://zalupa1.sblog.cz http://zalup.phpbbx.de http://blog.ialweb.it/pizda/

# sayangh said on March 8, 2007 10:49 AM:

One question I have is, SSIS has something called Script Task, which uses VSA and thus can only be coded with VB.NET. But many users want to use C#, as evident from http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=69559&SiteID=1

So will SSIS be using VSTA from now on to provide C# support for coding scripts? or will the user be able to make it so after using VSTA?

# Stephen Channell said on March 30, 2007 6:11 AM:

Thanks for giving me a reason to go back and take another look at InfoPath!..  XML forms will be a great  addition to future internet browser technology, but this prototype (;-)) is not overly relevant to real Office applications like Excel.  When will Excel integrate VSTA?

# zzxphq said on May 23, 2007 8:37 AM:

Hello! This is very interesting site.

I'll be back.

# osqvrxlyjr said on July 2, 2007 8:32 AM:

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# markovich said on October 6, 2007 4:14 PM:

Microsoft has integrated VSTA into the InfoPath 2007 application, which is part of these editions of Microsoft Office:

- Office Ultimate 2007

- Office Professional Plus 2007

- Office Enterprise 2007

# sa said on May 10, 2008 7:34 AM:

But the question remains:

When will Excel have VSTA???????

# DannyZee said on July 29, 2008 7:51 AM:

Two years of silence from Microsoft on Excel and VSTA.

Take a look at ResolverOne for real innovation in this space. http://www.resolversystems.com/

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