[RESOLVED] VSTO and C++

[daveJ]

There are a lot of new features in the Office 2007 suite that make it interesting to developers. I see it as an alternative user interface to desktop applications and Web clients. Unfortunately, Visual Studio Tools for Office is only available for C# and VB. Are there any plans to offer VSTO for C++/CLI?

[RonaldLaeremans]

Hi Dave,

No, there are no immediate plans to do so. From a recent discussion I had with that team, the decision is based on both surveys and 1:1 interactions the VSTO team has had with their customers. The most effective path is definitely to directly express your interest in C++/CLI support for VSTO to the team directly.

Ronald Laeremans
Acting Product Unit Manager
Visual C++ Team

[daveJ]

Thanks for your reply Ronald. Perhaps their current customers' needs are met by C#/VB, but if they want to open up Office to new applications where there is serious data crunching going on for things like information extraction and automatic XML tagging, they should consider C++.

What is the best way to contact the VSTO team with this message?

[RonaldLaeremans]

Hi,

The easiest way is probably to use the contact form on the VSTO team blog. Here is a link to the Blog main page.
http://blogs.msdn.com/vsto2/

Note that you should (relatively) easily be able to add a module written in C++ to a VSTO solution to enable you to do the number crunching in C++, even with the current version.

Thanks.

Ronald