Visual Studio Tools for Office: Using C# with Excel, Word, Outlook, and InfoPath

Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) was released in August of 2003. It

brought the power of .NET to developing Word and Excel applications. While

powerful, it was also lacking in some key features, and difficult to use. VSTO

2005 will be released as part of the Whidbey release. It will be incorporated in

the more advanced versions of Visual Studio .NET 2005, and will also be

available as a stand-alone product. It has corrected many of the major problems

with the first version, and is poised to experience a rapid growth in usage.

Coverage has been expanded to include Outlook and InfoPath in addition to

Word and Excel. This book is not only written by key members of the team

that developed VSTO 2005, but it will also be the first book available on

VSTO. The authors provide both an introduction to VSTO as well as a tutorial

for using it, including lots of practical examples, and a refreshing honesty about

both the strengths and pitfalls of the technology. This book will be a must-have

for all the developers considering VSTO.

ERIC CARTER is a lead developer on the Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) team at Microsoft. He helped invent, design, and implement many of the features that are in VSTO today. Previously at Microsoft he worked on Visual Studio for Applications, the Visual Studio Macros IDE, and Visual Basic for Applications for Office 2000 and Office 2003.

ERIC LIPPERT'S primary focus during his nine years at Microsoft has been on improving the lives of developers by designing and implementing useful programming languages and development tools. He has worked on the Windows Scripting family of technologies and, most recently, Visual Studio Tools for Office.

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