A beta release of a new add-in to Visual Studio .NET, code-named Visual Studio Tools for Office, allows developers to use Visual Studio .NET to build applications on top of the two most popular components of Office 2003—Word and Excel. The tools could provide a better development environment for Office-based clients and help produce more secure, reliable clients than the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) environment, which dominates Office development today.

Visual Studio .NET is the cornerstone of Microsoft’s developer tools and is based on the company’s .NET technologies, but Office 2003, like its predecessors, exposes its functions and features to developers using VBA. Although it has always been technically possible to integrate .NET code with VBA, the process was error-prone and Microsoft provided little in the way of tools.

The new tools allow developers to create Word documents and Excel workbooks that contain custom managed code written in either the Visual Basic .NET or C# programming languages.

For more information on Visual Studio Tools for Office, see "Visual Studio to Get Tools for Word, Excel" on page 16 of the Jan. 2003 Update.

Visual Studio Tools for Office is available for download at www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9e0b1b7c-4ab5-40d2-b4d9-5817ab0bc1e5.