VSTO, VSTA and MAF Explained

Do you know the difference between VSTO and VSTA? Did you already hear about MAF? Check out Andrew's latest post! Synopsis:

• VSTO was originally designed to support the building of managed extensions to Office applications.
• Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA) was branched from VSTO with the aim of providing the same kind of support for all applications, managed or unmanaged.
• Or to put it another way, VSTO is an Office-specific subset of VSTA.
• At the heart of VSTA is the Managed Add-in Framework (MAF). MAF is an architectural framework, with basic implementation in WinFx.
• MAF can be seen as the .NET equivalent of COM.