Chapter 1. Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO)
VSTO is a framework for the development of solutions for Microsoft Office tools. By using VSTO and what is known as managed code, developers can build Office solutions. Before we begin the chapter, let us see an overview of what we are going to cover in this chapter. This book is for Office Developers using Visual Studio Tools for Office. This chapter will make you comfortable with Visual Studio Tools for Office 3.0. We will be covering:
- What is Microsoft VSTO?
- Why do we need VSTO 3.0?
- New features added in VSTO 3.0 as compared with the older version
- The architecture of VSTO and the tools' approaches
- Infrastructural setup—system requirements, installation, and so on
- How VSTO is integrated with Visual Studio 2008, and its integrated design and debugging features
- New features in the next version of VSTO, and how VSTO can be further improved
VSTO helps you to build document-level solutions, where a solution is specific to the document for which it is deployed. You can build application-level solutions by using the application-level add-in for your solution development. The application-level add-in is accessible to all of the documents processed through that particular application.