PDC 05: Visual Studio Tools for Applications Announced

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Today we announced Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA). As Eric Rudder said, think of VSTA as the next generation of VBA. But is far more powerful, with the entire power of the .NET Framework, Visual Studio, and C# and VB .NET.

This morning at 11, the TLN 205 is all about VSTA. We had to give the talk a cryptic name to avoid letting the cat out of the bag. Go to that session to learn all about VSTA.

And if you want to learn about the underlying architecture of VSTA, come to my talk -- FUN 309 -- this afternoon. We will reveal the Managed Addin Framework (MAF). It is the set of system level pieces that allow VSTA and all Addin enabled apps to work and work together in a common, flexible way. Rest assured I will be blogging extensively on MAF.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 15, 2005
    Back when .NET Framework was first released, there were "VSA" (Visual Studio for Applications I assume) references in a lot of places. Is VSTA essentially VSA for the masses?
  • Anonymous
    September 15, 2005
    Hopefully. :) I might get in trouble for saying this, but VSTA is in some sense a re-architecture of VSA. VSA has been deprecated in CLR 2.0 and is being superceded by VSTA going forward. We learned a number of lessons with VSA and we think we've got it all right now with VSTA.