Visual Studio Tools for Office
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Q1: What is Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System?

A new suite of software tools that will provide developers, in one box, the tools and technologies they need to build the next generation of solutions for the Microsoft Office System.
This suite, announced June 9, 2003, brings the power and productivity of Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework to business solutions built on Word 2003 and Excel 2003. With this technology, developers using Visual Studio .NET 2003 can use Visual Basic .NET and Visual C# .NET to write code behind Word and Excel-based applications.

Q2: Does the Access 2003 Developer Extensions come with the Visual Studio Tools for Office?

Yes! The Access 2003 Developer Extensions provide the tools and resources developers need to more quickly and easily create, test and deploy sophisticated Access solutions. The Developer Extensions include a royalty-free Access Runtime enabling distribution of Access solutions. The Developer Extensions also include tools, with source code, for creating professional setup routines, globally searching solutions for custom strings and creating solutions that have been stripped of all source code.

Q3: What else comes with Visual Studio Tools for the MS Office System?

1) Microsoft Visual Basic .NET Standard Edition:

For the programmer who wants to learn the Visual Basic language by constructing applications for Windows and the Web. In addition, developers can use the Visual Studio Tools for Office with Visual Basic .NET Standard.

2) Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Developer Edition: This makes it possible for developers to develop and test their solutions thoroughly before deploying them to the enterprise.

Q4: What about VBA in Office?

Businesses and developers have long benefited from the ability to use Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to customize Microsoft Office applications and integrate them with existing data and systems. While VBA continues to be an important part of Office development (and benefits from the new features of Microsoft Office 2003), Visual Studio Tools for Office will provide significant advances in the areas of language choice and innovation, security, deployment, and the integrated development environment (IDE).

Q5: Provide a business scenario for using Visual Studio Tools for Office?

Developers want to write code behind Word and Excel to address any number of business scenarios. They may also want to write business logic that manages budget figures in an Excel spreadsheet, or populate a table in a Word document with sales figures obtained using an XML Web service. Developers using Visual Studio .NET can use Visual Studio Tools for Office to address these and many other scenarios.

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