Office 2007 is a cool suite that everyone of us are waiting,
but saying only that Office 2007 is a suite of tools for our productivity is a
mistake: Office 2007 is nowadays a new complete service platform, so writing
applications that can interact with the platform itself will be always more a
must.
In this scenario of future directions, it's extremely important to know that
in these days KD Hallman (General Manager for the Visual Studio Tools for
Office Team), has
announced the future release of
"Cypress", a free update to VSTO that adds the
complete support for Office 2007 development.
As Hallman explains, "Cypress will include the following
functionalities:
- Application-level add-ins for the most popular Office applications
including Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, InfoPath and Visio. This is
currently the #1 most requested feature for VSTO – safe loading, unloading,
and management of managed add-ins. I’m thrilled that we’re going to be
able to provide this functionality to developers much earlier than
anticipated.
- Office key feature support: programming model and runtime support for
Ribbon, Custom Task Panes, and Outlook forms regions. Office’s new UI
contains exciting extensibility opportunities and Cypress will enable VSTO’s
simple coding experiences like IntelliSense.
- Maintainability and compatibility are core principles for the VSTO
team and Cypress will also ensure that your applications built on Office 2003
with VSTO 2005 continue to run with Office 2007. "
The most interesting fact is that Cypress will ship at the same
time of Office 2007 and it will be released as an add-on
(free) that will install right on top of your existing Visual Studio 2005
installation. So, we'll be ready soon to build applications that target Office
2007 without waiting for "Orcas". 