Tools Updated for Office 2007

A free update to Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office (VSTO 2005) offers support for Office 2007 and its new user interface, as well as more flexible options for building and deploying applications for Office 2003. The update is the latest step in Microsoft’s decade-long effort to make Office an integral part of corporate line-of-business applications, instead of merely a tool for creating documents, in hopes of spurring Office upgrades and staunching moves to browser-based or competitive alternatives, such as ASP.NET applications, Google Spreadsheets, or OpenOffice. However, the update’s integration with Visual Studio and previous versions is somewhat spotty.

The formal name of the update is Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System, but Microsoft usually refers to it as Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 Second Edition (VSTO 2005 SE).

Application-Level Add-Ins, with Caveats

VSTO 2005 SE adds the ability to create application-level add-ins for Office applications.