MS Office versions/patches

MS Office versions/patches

• thomas.macht

  That's great $1K for the pro subscription and no office why bother including VSTO

  Now I've got to go buy office pro on top. Microsoft would do well looking after the little guy, after all we are the ones on the ground spreading your products.

  
  

• Rick.H

  Hi Ross, I hope this helps:

  Does VSTO require SP1 for MS Office 2003   As far as I can tell, it definitely requires Office 2003. 
  >> For designtime you require Office 2003 SP1.  There are a number of bug fixes that have gone into Office 2003 SP2 that will give you a more solid base to work on. You should be running SP1 as a minimum, but I recommend you install SP2 if you're looking to have the best experience.

  Secondarily, is there a particular version/edition of Visual Studio 2005 that works best with VSTO or does this additional toolset behave the same whether you have VS 2005 standard, pro, or one of the team share editions  
  >> Either the VSTO 2005 product or any of the VSTS products will give you all that you need to build Office customizations around Word, Excel and Outlook.  Product information can be found at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/products/compare/default.aspx
  look at the Office Development Support row to see which VS products contain VSTO projects.

  Does VSTO work with VS 2005 and VS .NET 2003 or is there a different edition/equivalent of VSTO for VS .NET 2003
  >>VSTO 2003 shipped as an add-on to VS .NET 2003 Pro. It provided support for building Word and Excel customizations (no Outlook support).  VSTO 2005 provides a richer toolset and programming model to make it easier for developers to build solutions in Word and Excel.  There's a designer, support for managed controls, databinding support, Actions Pane support, Smart Tag support, a programmable object that allows you to populate a document on the server...the list goes on and on.  I'd definitely recommend moving to VSTO 2005.  If you have already invested in VSTO 2003, not to worry.  There's a migration wizard that lets you migrate VSTO 2003 projects to VSTO 2005.

  If VSTO does work with both 2005 and 2003, are the framework requirements for .NET 2.0 and 1.1 respectively
  >> Yes. There are framework requirements and solutions are forward compatible.  Meaning, if you have a VSTO 2003 solution that was built ont op of .NET 1.1, then it will continue to work when .NET 2.0 is installed. The opposite is not true however, a VSTO 2005 solution built on .NET 2.0 will not run on a machine with only .NET 1.1. 

  
  
  

• Boris C

  On second thoughts the pro/pro MSDN subscription is a ripoff.

  All you realy get is XP, 2003, VS, VSTO and SQL2005

  Seems you can get the express versions for SQL2005 and VS for free it'll be alot cheaper to buy the OS's and use the express versions.

  The only reason to get this MSDN version is for VSTO which you can't use unless you buy office pro ... another $500. Add it up..

  
  

• Frank Winter

  Thank you both for your answers.

  As a confirmation follow-up, am I correct in inferring that the best package for my situation is to go with the VS 2005 Pro with MSDN Pro subscription for about $1199 (microsoft pricing $US) As I understand it, the subscription would give me VSTO access while the VS 2005 Pro edition would give me access to c++ and other features potentially needed to accomplish my tasks.

  I am bridging from Java to MS Office to provide capabilities including sending and receiving (polling) for email with attachments (and without the annoying security prompts popping up), and for sending and possibly manipulating data in excel, word, and powerpoint (of which the latter doesn't seem to be supported by the VSTO). Each machine will have XP SP 2, MS Office SP 2 or 3, .NET Framework 2.0, and JRE 1.4.2_10.

  Given the information above, does this approach and software package selection seem suitable toward accomplishing these tasks We may eventually require bidirectional communication between the Java client and an Office app.

  Ross

  
  

• capyu

  Hi Ross:

  Here is a link where you can review a complete set of features and system requirements for VSTO 2005.

  The previous version of our product, VSTO 2003, does work with VS 2003. Obviously, VSTO 2005 is meant to work with VS 2005.

  VSTO 2003 requires the .NET Framework 1.1 and VSTO 2005 requires the .NET Framework 2.0. Both work only with Office 2003 Professional and above, or the standalone versions (2003) of Word and Excel.

  Hope this helps!

  Mike Hernandez
  Community Program Manager
  VSTO Team

  
  

• Eburon

  Here is what you'll get with the MSDN Professional Subscription:

  MSDN Library

  Support

  Operating Systems (a,b)

  SQL Developer Edition (a)

  Visual FoxPro

  Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition

  Visual Studio Tools for Office

  Access Developer Extensions

  Virtual PC

  Technical Support Incidents (2)

  Download Access

  Media Kits

  Online Concierge

  MSDN Managed Newsgroups

  A Software included in MSDN Subscriptions provides limited usage rights for development, testing, and demonstration purposes only. MSDN Subscriptions provide the most recent version of these products through regular shipments and many previous versions are available from MSDN Subscriber Downloads. B All major Microsoft Operating Systems includes Windows 2000 Professional, Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2000 Advanced Server, Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Professional Edition, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP Media Center 2005.

  Please note that you'll have to have Office 2003 Professional installed on the client machines in order to create and use VSTO solutions.

  And you're quite right - PowerPoint is not supported in VSTO 2005.

  I would think this would be quite suitable for accomplishing your tasks. In the end, however, you will have to make the final determination.

  Thanks!

  Mike Hernandez
  Community Program Manager
  VSTO Team

  
  
• MS Office versions/patches