VSTO 2 Gods, Please Pardon My Error!

Over a year and a half ago, this little known team building Visual Studio Tools for Office invited me to a private meeting to talk about the future of Office Development. What they showed me was working code of a number of Office developer tools under development. I was totally excited about what I saw and also knew what I was seeing would change the Office development world.

I have to compliment this team, as they laid out a clear plan and they are delivering on their stated goals. Why is this shocking? A lot of teams typically are forced to drop a large number of features they plan by the time they ship. So far, the VSTO team is delivering on the key goals they presented way back then. (For those in the ?know?, I call that ?Long term strategy? that corporations can rely on. Others could learn a lesson from having a far reaching strategy that covers multiple releases.)

I also have to beg forgiveness from the VSTO team for some bad feedback I gave. One of the questions they asked was: Should we host Office documents in the design time environment of VS .NET? I told them I?d rather see them get other features working before making the large investment to get this one working. BOY WAS I WRONG!!!! In a recent Microsoft Web Cast I saw this technology in action and have to say its awesome!

Here is a screen shot (Click for a better shot):

What this basically means is that a Word or Excel document is a canvas just like WinForm development in VS .NET.

Hopefully they won?t reject my feedback in the future :-).