Visual Studio Tools for office "V3" CTP!

Office developer's Conference 2006 is being held in the United States. The first thing that came out at the Conference was Visual Studio Tools for office V3, the first CTP test version of the next-generation Office 2007 development platform.

Vsto V3 is for Office 2007 beta1 technical refresh. It also requires support from Visual Studio 2005 team system (or a separate vsto 2005 version) and winfx feb06 CTP.

Compared with vsto2005, vsto V3 has the following major improvements:

1. ApplicationProgramSupport for plug-in development

Vsto2005 only supports the development of Outlook 2003 add-in. To develop plug-ins for other office components, you can only use the shared add-in project type in Visual Studio 2005. Vsto V3 provides built-in plug-in development support for all Office 2007 components (access, Excel, Sharepoint designer, infopath, outlook, PowerPoint, project, publisher, Visio, and word.

2. Application-level task pane

Vsto2005 supports the document-level task pane, but does not support application-level tasks. That is to say, vsto2005 can only develop the task pane for a specific document, you cannot develop a task pane that always exists in an application (such as Word or Excel. Vsto V3 finally supports the application-level task pane!

3. Custom RIBBON

What is ribbon? If you have seen the new page of Office 2007, you must be impressed with the tabs in the upper row. They are ribbon. Through vsto V3, We can customize our own ribbon.

4. Support for new open XML document formats

In Office 2007, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents all use a new fully XML-based document format. The official name is open XML file format. In addition, for this new document format, Office 2007 also uses a new file extension to distinguish it from the previous version based on the binary document format. Word 2007 new document extension is docx, Excel 2007 new document extension is XLSX and so on...

Vsto V3 makes full use of this new document format. For example, it saves data in data island in the document as a separate XML part, instead of using an ole control like vsto2005 to save data in data island.

Click here to download vsto V3 CTP.