Is VSTO the right choice for the future?

[kenshiro2000]

I'm very confused about Microsoft strategy, so I'll ask you....

will Office 12 VBA.NET substitute VSTO?

Can I develop a solution in Office 2003 and VSTO 2005/2003 now and to
be secure that I will be able to use this solution in Office 12 too?

Please clarify me this aspect of Microsoft strategy if you know :-)

Where can I found any information about architecture and evolution on
Office platform?

We have a lot of Office XP VBA code and some VB DLL and we have only
two choice:

- OpenOffice + Java
- Office 2003/12+VB.NET/C#

Thanks

ken

[Alvin Bruney - ASP.NET MVP]

You can predict it, it depends on how the new stuff will be accepted. If it
isn't succesfully, there's no point in supporting it. I usually adopt a wait
and see attitude with new technology.

--
Regards,
Alvin Bruney [MVP ASP.NET]

[Shameless Author plug]
The Microsoft Office Web Components Black Book with .NET
Now Available @ www.lulu.com/owc
Forth-coming VSTO.NET - Wrox/Wiley 2006
-------------------------------------------------------

"kenshiro2000" <kenshi...@libero.it> wrote in message
news:1138307762.1...@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...

[kenshiro2000]

Yes, ok, but VSTO is a consolidated technology (2003/2005)....so I
think in Office 12 VSTO should be persist....I prefer to use VSTO with
Office 2003/Office12 and not VBA or VBA.NET

[Harry Miller [MSFT]]

The VSTO team and the Office team are working together to make sure that
solutions you create for Office 2003 using VSTO 2005 will continue to work
with Office 12. In addition, the plan is to keep VBA in Office for the next
version, so existing VBA solutions should continue to work also.

--
Harry Miller
Technical Editor, Visual Studio Tools for Office
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

"kenshiro2000" <kenshi...@libero.it> wrote in message
news:1138307762.1...@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...

[Norman Yuan]

There is no point, IMO, to invest much effort on VSTO2005 before the
requirement for Office2003 Professional Edition is removed. How many of your
targeting users have Office2003Pro instead of Office2003Std? Unless you know
you only target those small crowd of advanced professional users...Do not
know if upcoming Office12 still attach such a ridiculous string.

"kenshiro2000" <kenshi...@libero.it> wrote in message
news:1138307762.1...@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...

[kenshiro2000]

Fine thanks,

I wan't use VBA, but I would reengineer a new solution only with VSTO
2005 and Office 2003 or the upcoming versions.

[ewolf72...@discussions.microsoft.com]

Can anyone from Microsoft confirm this is true?

My quick web searching has revealed that, indeed, the requirements for VSTO
2005 are Office 2003 Professional or stand-alone Word or stand-alone Excel.
No mention of Office 2003 Standard. Nor can I find mention of the Office
2003 small business editions. Can someone from the VSTO team respond with
what versions of Office 2003 are supported? Also, if not supported, will
VSTO solutions still work on things like Office 2003 Standard Edition?

Thanks!!

[Harry Miller [MSFT]]

You are right, VSTO 2005 requires Office 2003 Professional or stand-alone
Word or Excel. The solutions will not run if the user has Office 2003
Standard or the small business editions, which are based on Standard. The
complete list of editions that support VSTO are here:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/library/54ds2za4(en-US,VS.80).aspx

--
Harry Miller
Technical Editor

Visual Studio Tools for Office
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

"ewo...@gmail.com" <ewolf72...@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in
message news:2B02DE7B-059D-4D2B...@microsoft.com...

[ewolf72...@discussions.microsoft.com]

Interesting. Is there anything that can be done to make Office 2003 Standard
(and the small business editions) compatible with VSTO 2005? What is missing
from those products which break compatability with VSTO? I'm concerned about
the ubiquity of any VSTO solution if it doesn't work on these platforms. Any
advice or thoughts?

[lyn...@gmail.com]

I'd also really like to hear Microsoft's rationale for not supporting
VSTO in non-Professional versions of Office. Was this a technical
challenge? Or was it a strategic choice?

Microsoft seems to be making a huge push towards using VSTO (and
rightly so -- the actions pane stuff is cool), but yet much of the
general public may not even have VSTO capability if they are running
Office Standard or Office Small Biz.

We are a small ISV and we'd *love* to utilize VSTO in some of the
component packages we build right now, but we're scared to head down
that road due to this seemingly major limitation. Does anyone even know
what percentage of the Office population is using Standard versus Small
Biz versus Professional?

Can anyone from MS chime in here and discuss the rationale as to why
VSTO is not supported in non-Professional versions of Office? In
addition, can anyone from MS comment on Office 12 -- will this have the
same limitation, or will all versions of Office 12 support VSTO?

[Phil Rayner]

I too am intersted in making VSTO work with Office Standard. Can this be
done. I know it is not "officially" supported by Microsoft, but what is
different about these products.

Our client has an infrastructure that has rolled out Office Standard, as
they still use MS-Access XP (from Office XP). We are currently having
deployment issues, obviously with Office Standard, but even after
uninstalling standard and installing Pro. Basically it seems like the
Autoexec for the .NET VSTO code is not firing.

Anyone have any clues on this?

"ewo...@gmail.com" <ewolf72...@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in
message news:33DFE8F5-C6B6-46F2...@microsoft.com...

[Alvin Bruney - ASP.NET MVP]

As far as I know, standard simply will not work. I know of no workaround
either. The last time I asked about this dependency, I was told that
professional edition has a more robust support for security, XML etc than
standard

--
Regards,
Alvin Bruney [MVP ASP.NET]

[Shameless Author plug]
The Microsoft Office Web Components Black Book with .NET
Now Available @ www.lulu.com/owc
Forth-coming VSTO.NET - Wrox/Wiley 2006
-------------------------------------------------------

"Phil Rayner" <enli...@newsgroups.nospam> wrote in message
news:efSUmNqJ...@TK2MSFTNGP09.phx.gbl...

[Maarten van Stam [MVP VSTO]]

Well I'm not from Microsoft, but I can confirm that it is true.

Without the XML support for Microsoft Office 2003, Microsoft Excel and/or
Microsoft Word will not load a VSTO assembly.

The XML support is only available in the Professional Editions of Microsoft
Office 2003, or in the stand-alone versions of Microsoft Word and Microsoft
Excel. To include the XML support in these versions was a marketing
decision.

By the way... VSTO is NOT a replacement for all the VBA code that is out
there. VSTO is a new way of developing great Smart Documents. A lot of VBA
applications -could- be replaced by VSTO applications, but if your VBA app
is mainly application oriented you'll be selecting VBA (for now...)

-= Maarten=-
MVP - Visual Developer - VSTO
http://blogs.officezealot.com/maarten

[kenshiro2000]

We have a lot a code distributed in VBA code, DLL in VB6. We would like
to reengineer all this solution with VSTO 2005 /Office2003/Office12
without VBA but with C#/VB.NET.

We use Word to add semantics data in a document, so the concept of
smartdocuments is very interesting. But this process is much expensive
in term of time and resources so we would be secure that it is the
right choice.

The alternative platform could be OpenOffice with UNO and Java, but
this SDK is too complex and productivity will not be high, I think.

thanks

ken

[ewolf72...@discussions.microsoft.com]

This marketing decision by Microsoft is an unfortunate one, IMO. It
artifically limits the potential audience of any VSTO solution. Does anyone
know the marketing numbers for what percentage of people run Office 2003
Professional versus the other versions of the suite?

So, if I've got a client who is running Office 2003 Standard Edition, is
there an upgrade path to get them to Office 2003 Professional Edition? While
I am aware of Office 2000 or XP -> 2003 upgrades, I am not familiar with
upgrades within the 2003 family. Anyone have any ideas on this?

One last question... Does anyone know if Office 12 will suffer from the
same ill marketing logic as Office 2003 has?

I must confess, as a solution provider, this certainly shakes my confidence
in using VSTO for development. While I like what VSTO has to offer (and I
was seriously looking forward to future versions), I'm just not sure I can
depend on my clients having Office 2003 Pro. Why invest the time in learning
a platform that only a subset of clients can leverage?

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi Kenshiro2000,

> We have a lot a code distributed in VBA code, DLL in VB6. We would like
> to reengineer all this solution with VSTO 2005 /Office2003/Office12
> without VBA but with C#/VB.NET.
>

If you currently have VB6 DLL add-ins, then VSTO 2005 isn't the correct
product for you to be looking at. VSTO 2003/2005 is document-specific.

At this point, you'd have the option of creating a .NET Addin for COM
(using a Shim) that will work basically the same as your current COM
Addin.

Due to NDA I can't do more than give you a hint, BUT if you're looking
ahead to Office 12, I suggest you read the public developer info that
comes out with Beta 2 and try to get into the Beta 2 program.

-- Cindy

[kenshiro2000]

Hi Cindy,

Thanks, but my boss say me that enterprise choice is OpenOffice. So I
must learn OpenOffice SDK and integrae with Java Application :-(

I think that SmartDocument and SmartTags are technologies very powerful
but OpenSource wave in my environment is too strong.

Bye and thanks again