Jacob Cynamon

Derek, I just recently had the privilege of presenting a brief seminar on Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the Microsoft Office System (VSTO 2005) and wanted to take a moment to address your recent editorial. Although your complaints are somewhat justified when applied to VSTO 2003, the developer team up in Redmond has done a bang-up job of enhancing the tools for Visual Studio 2005. Of course, developers who use VSTO will still be leveraging .NET managed extensions that communicate with the Office 2003 primary interop assemblies (PIAs), i.e., COM-interop, but you’ll be glad to know that there have been some significant improvements and additions to VSTO in its upcoming iteration. The application surfaces are now integrated with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. When you are producing a VSTO solution, you no longer need to have Visual Studio and either Micro... (more)