Microsoft® .NET Development for Microsoft Office

Chapter 10. Visual Studio Tools for Office

One of the many enhancements to Microsoft Office introduced with Office 2003 is the Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) toolkit. This toolkit seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 to allow you to build managed assemblies that are associated with particular Excel workbooks or Word documents. This is a modern alternative to the traditional approach of using VBA code embedded within a workbook or document.

This technology applies only to Office 2003 and later, so all references in this chapter to "Office" refer to those versions only. Office 2003 has been enhanced to support managed "code-behind" assemblies, so it’s not possible to hook an Office 2003 code-behind assembly into an ...