The Visual Studio (VS) Tools for Office enable developers to create Word and Excel applications with the Visual Studio environment and languages. The tools could encourage developers creating Office solutions in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to move to more strategic developer technologies, but they also deliver some features for VBA development.

Formally called the Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System, the toolkit includes four components:

VS Tools for Office is a set of extensions to VS.NET that enable developers to use the .NET Framework and languages such as Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET) and C# to build custom solutions around Word and Excel. Previously, developers creating Word and Excel solutions normally worked in VBA, which is being phased out in favor of the .NET Framework.

VB.NET Standard Edition is included so that developers who have not yet upgraded from previous versions of VB can use the new Office tools.

SQL 2000 Developer Edition allows developers to build and test solutions that require SQL Server.

Access 2003 Developer Extensions is a set of tools designed to ease the development and deployment of solutions using Access, including a package wizard to create setup programs based on the Windows installer. Unlike the other three components, these tools are intended for use with VBA, and effectively replace the now-discontinued Office Developer Edition for VBA developers.

Pricing and Additional Resources

The estimated retail price for the VS Tools for Office is US$499 with upgrade pricing of US$199 available to users of any of the following products:

• Visual Studio .NET 2003 Professional Edition, Enterprise Developer, or Enterprise Architect 2002 or later
• Visual Studio Professional or Enterprise Edition 97 or later
• Visual Basic Professional or Enterprise Edition 5.0 or later
• Visual C++ Professional or Enterprise Edition 5.0 or later
• Visual FoxPro Professional Edition 5.0 or later
• Visual InterDev Professional Edition 1.0 or later
• Visual J++ Professional Edition 1.1 or later
• Office XP Developer Edition
• Office Developer Edition 97 or later.

For technical details, see "Visual Studio to Get Tools for Word, Excel" on page 16 of the Jan. 2003 Update and "Access in Transition" on page 21 of the Oct. 2003 Update.

The home page for VS Tools for Office is msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/office.