Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System : VSTO

Update Your Blog Readers, We've Moved!

VSTO Team — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 21:09:00 GMT

The Visual Studio Tools for Office team has moved to http://blogs.msdn.com/vsto , and the RSS feed is http://blogs.msdn.com/vsto/rss.xml. We've got a lot more team members set up to blog over there so come on over and join us!

Important Links:

Office Development with Visual Studio Blog

Office Development How Do I Videos

Office Development Screencasts on Channel 9

VSTO Runtime Assembly Name Changes from Beta 2 to RTM

VSTO Team — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 22:11:00 GMT

If you created a project for Microsoft Office 2007 using Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, you will probably see a number of broken assembly references if you open the project in the final release of Visual Studio 2008. This is because most of the assemblies in the version of the VSTO runtime that is used for Microsoft Office 2007 projects were changed after Beta 2.

To fix the errors, replace any broken references to assemblies in the first column of the table below with a reference to the corresponding assembly name in the second column.

Beta 2 name	RTM name
Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Office.Common.dll	Microsoft.Office.Tools.Common.v9.0.dll
Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Office.Excel.dll	Microsoft.Office.Tools.Excel.v9.0.dll
Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Office.Outlook.dll	Microsoft.Office.Tools.Outlook.v9.0.dll
Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Office.Word.dll	Microsoft.Office.Tools.Word.v9.0.dll
Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Office.dll	Microsoft.Office.Tools.v9.0.dll
Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Applications.AddInBase.dll Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Applications.Common.dll Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Applications.Runtime.dll	Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Applications.Runtime.v9.0.dll (three assemblies from Beta 2 were merged into this one)
Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Applications.ServerDocument.dll	Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Applications.ServerDocument.v9.0.dll
Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Office.Runtime.dll	Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Office.Runtime.v9.0.dll

For more information about the purpose of each of these assemblies, see “Visual Studio Tools for Office Runtime Overview” at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb608603(VS.90).aspx. Also, be sure to check out the podcast "Why a VSTO Runtime" at http://blogs.msdn.com/vsto2/archive/2007/07/23/why-a-vsto-runtime.aspx for a brief history of the VSTO runtime and why there are different versions for each release of Microsoft Office.

OBA/VSTO Starter Kit v. 1.0 Ships

VSTO Team — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 00:48:00 GMT

Many of you may have heard about Office Business Applications, or OBAs. If not, OBAs are essentially composite applications that you can build using the Microsoft Office 2007 system. Part of the goal of OBAs is to also integrate with LOB systems, such as SAP, PeopleSoft and Dynamics to extend the power of the Office suite to enterprise systems. To learn more about OBAs and to find additional resources, take a look at this site: http://www.microsoft.com/isv/Oba.mspx.

As part of an effort to help developers extend office programmatically, we recently released an OBA/VSTO Starter Kit v.1.0 that shows developers how you can build an OBA that integrates SAP with Office 2007 using VSTO. The kit provides an overview whitepaper, installation documentation and source code to help you, the developer, understand how you can build composite applications using VSTO. These key deliverables are posted here:

1. OBA/VSTO Starter Kit v. 1.0 Whitepaper: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb498190.aspx

2. OBA/VSTO Starter Kit v. 1.0 Installation Document: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb498189.aspx

3. OBA/VSTO Starter Kit v. 1.0 Source Code: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=120AAAA8-0A0C-4A0B-B605-4E08FFE7A786&displaylang=en

I hope you find this kit useful.

Steve Fox

Program Manager