VSTO impressions
Two weeks ago, a did a talk about Visual Studio Tools for the Office System (VSTO) en behalf of MSDN Canada in Quebec City. Here are a few thoughts:
Although VSTO 2003 brings the .NET world to Office 2003, it's far from perfect. The fact that you don't have a Word or Excel design surface is awkward. VSTO 2005 solves this. It's quite amazing to see Word and Excel hosted and fully functional in Visual Studio 2005.
The coolest new trick in 2005 is the possibility to place controls in the Actions Pane (you kow, that section at right of the document?). It is sooooo easy, just create a user control, drop a few controls and with one line of code, the user control is sitting in the Actions Pane. I like the fact that you have a clean separation between the document and the controls the user can use to make some action. Coolness factor: very high!
VSTO is really targeted at pro developers and the fact that you need to deploy a policy for the code to run limits it to enterprises. I haven't spent a lot of time on this but I see real deployment challenges ahead.
My biggest rant is with the way VSTO 2003 is presently marketed. It's available in a bundle that includes: VSTO, the Access runtime, VB.NET Standard and SQL Server dev edition. MSDN subscribers can also download it. VSTO targets the enterprise developer so why the heck bundle it with VB.NET Standard ? Enterprise developers already have access to the Pro or Architect version of Visual Studio (along with SQL dev edition). It makes no sense to me. Also, why charge for VSTO? Microsoft pushing so hard for .NET adoption, it should be free and available by itself.
I was impressed by the VSTO 2005 Beta and opening the .NET world to Office development is a real plus for Office developers. Check it out.
http://msdn.microsoft.ca/office (Canada - VSTO 2003 videos with Kate Gregory)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/office
MSDN articles
Bring the Power of Visual Studio .NET to Business Solutions Built with Microsoft Office
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/03/09/microsoftoffice2003/default.aspx
Secure and Deploy Business Solutions with Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/04/03/ToolsforOffice2003/
Guy