VSTO SE released

Approximately one year ago, Microsoft has released the VSTO. This version was and is a great idea to enable .NET developers to fully utilize the power of office applications. Unfortunately, the were some design decisions, which just constrained pushing of many new applications based on the VSTO.

For example, the VSTO based solution is document-centric. It means the assembly which extend the functionality of one office application was implicitly embedded to the specific document, by using of some metadata mechanism. For some scenarios out there this feature  was just enough.

In the reality, you will probably receive some office documents  from the customer, who is from different enterprise infrastructure. In such cases was almost impossible to embed the managed assembly to the document.

Now, Microsoft has written in just few months  the completely new version of VSTO, which is called VSTO SE (second edition). Note that this is the new version which should coexist with the existing VSTO. It is designed for Office 2007 and is compatible with Office 2003.

The great thing is that VSTO SE is application centric and no more document centric. Finally.

Last but not least, VSTO SE additionally allows one to design the Custom Task Panes and Ribbons, which are new one in the Office 2007.

I will post soon some examples, which show how to utilize VSTO SE and Office 2007. 

 PS. The future version of VSTO SE should be fully integrated in the Visual Studio Orcas and should provide Click-Once mechanism for updating of managed assemblies. 

Here is a download.