Microsoft promises new tools for souping up Office applications

By Alun Williams

Posted on 15 Oct 2003 at 11:55

Ahead of the 21 October launch of its Office System, Microsoft has announced 'Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System'. The tools are for developers looking to soup up, for example, Word- or Excel-based applications.

While in the old days it was just macros and VBA, Visual C# .NET or Visual Basic.Net can now be used, for example, to customise corporate data with Web services. The idea is to make the most of the .Net
Framework that is already involved in supporting such C# programming.

The new tools provide 'significant advances in the areas of language choice and innovation, security, deployment and maintenance,' claims Microsoft.

Although, UK pricing for Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System has yet to be confirmed, the ESP for the States is $499. Upgrade pricing is available to customers of other Microsoft development systems, such as Visual Studio Professional or Microsoft Visual Basic Professional.

More info can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/office/, but currently only a previous beta version is available for download.