Microsoft is to sell a bundle of tools for developers
who create custom applications on top of Microsoft's Office System
products.
Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System will include
the Visual Studio tools for Office announced last December, plus
Access 2003 Developer Extensions, Visual Basic .net Standard
Edition and SQL Server 2000 Developer Edition.
The set of tools will allow developers who use Visual Studio to
create applications for Office using Visual Basic .net and Visual
C# .net and allow Access developers to start learning Visual Basic
.net and use it to develop applications for Office, said Robert
Green, lead product manager for Visual Studio at Microsoft.
Visual Studio Tools for Office was limited to tools that allow
developers to use Visual Studio .net to create applications on top
of Word and Excel.
Developers have been able to customise Word and Excel using
Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), which ships as part of Office
and is the Office language that macros are written in. Examples of
such customisations are expense reporting in Excel and company
directories in Word.
Visual Studio .net is Microsoft's main developer environment. It
offers more options and benefits than VBA, including better
security and the ability to make use of full-featured programming
languages. There is also the advantage that code created with
Visual Studio can sit on a server or in some central location,
while VBA code has to be part of the document.
Although Microsoft has now released packaging information for
its Visual Studio Tools for Office, no pricing information is
available. The product will be available through the regular
channels shortly after the release of Office 2003, which is planned
for the third quarter.
Joris Evers writes for IDG News Service