By Greg DeMichillie [bio]
Posted: Jun. 25, 2007

The following is an illustration accompanying an article published by Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm focused exclusively on Microsoft strategy & technology. More samples of our content, as well as a list of upcoming articles and reports are also available.

Visual Studio (VS) 2008 improves support for building applications that run on top of Office 2007. In this screen shot, the developer is building an application that runs within Excel. At the top of the window is the new Ribbon designer, which allows the developer to visually create custom ribbons that take advantage of the new Office 2007 user interface. The lower part of the window shows the developer is creating the spreadsheet that will be part of the solution by directly editing the spreadsheet from within VS.