Visual Studio Office Tools

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.