The Ins-and-Outs of VSTO Can Be Confusing
Developing solutions with Microsoft Office using VSTO can be difficult as it isn’t as straight-forward as targeting a version of the .NET Framework to support and then proceeding with all the activities involved with developing a custom solution.
Nope. If you are targeting Office, you are potentially dealing with several versions of Office. If so, then you could be dealing with multiple versions of VSTO. And if so, then you are dealing with multiple strategies for dealing with your VSTO solution’s deployment and security.
VSTO is great and I use it as often as I can but it can be a mess to coordinate all the overlapping components of Office, Visual Studio, and the .NET Framework. Keeping all the details related to the various scenarios of when to use what is difficult. In fact, my notes are sometimes indecipherable.
So I am glad to have found an FAQ on MSDN’s VSTO forum that provides answers to complex situations you will encounter when using VSTO to build Office add-ins.
The VSTO FAQ on MSDN
Here is the link to Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) FAQs
This FAQ includes answers to such questions as:
- How many versions of Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) are there, and what are the differences between them?
- What are the similarities and differences between Shared Add-In and VSTO application-level Add-In?
- Why doesn’t my VSTO add in load after the deployment, but works on my development machine when debugging in Visual Studio?
- How to get the location of the custom task pane when it is floating?
- What registry entries in the client machine are needed when an Add-In is deployed?
- and 14 more….
If you are new to VSTO or even if you are an experienced VSTO developer, this site is worth the 5 minutes it will take to read over the FAQ.
