VSTO For Dummies

Introduction

A couple of years back, before Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) was released, one of the most popular tools for developing for Microsoft Office were macros and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). With macros, you can automate a repetitive task inside Office applications. For simple Office applications, VBA is enough, but very soon, you'd want to use something more powerful, secure, and flexible.

This is where VSTO comes into play. With VSTO, you can do so much more than with plain VBA. There are many reasons you'd want to switch to VSTO, but the best one would definitely be the .NET framework. Yes, VSTO is built upon the .NET framework, which means you can use all the .NET goodness in your VSTO Office solutions.

With VSTO, you have all your client side needs covered. Now you want to move to the server side, and SharePoint is a very wise choice. But what is SharePoint? You can think of SharePoint as a place where all your (client side) documents and workbooks come together. SharePoint is a place to store, categorize, and share your Office documents. SharePoint is a huge topic that deserves a separate book. However, we do touch on SharePoint development in this book as well.

About This Book

The main purpose of this book is to attract existing Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) or Office developers and help them make the transition from unmanaged VBA world to managed .NET world. The logical choice to transition from VBA is to use Visual Studio Tools for Office. So, ...