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Summary: VSTO High Five WikiSheet

High Five for Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office

Top 5 Business Needs

1. Increase Information Worker Productivity Using Office as a front-end to business applications reduces the need for users to copy/paste information between LoB applications and business documents, reducing the errors and costs associated with manual data aggregation.
2. Unlock business data stored in documents Tight integration with back-end systems avoids having important business data locked away in isolated documents.
3. Reduce Training Costs Leverage the existing knowledge of 400 million users that are already familiar with Office
4. Increase Developer Productivity Use tools and development paradigms that make Office development approachable by the professional developer
5. Reduce IT Operations Cost Simplify updates and maintenance of Office solutions

Top 5 Technology Enablers

1. Custom solutions hosted inside Office applications Connect to live business data from within an Office application to provide a seamless experience for your end-user.
2. Web services Use web services to connect to back-end data sources from within Office applications.
3. Rich Office UI and intuitive windows controls Extend the already familiar Office UI by providing deep UI integration via the task pane and smart tags.
4. Professional developer tools and a powerful programming model Use a professional-grade developer tool that provides things like integrated debugging, access to source code control systems and a rich, modern development framework.
5. Separation of code and documents Decouple solution code from documents and enable server-based deployment models to facilitate upgrades and maintenance.

Top 5 Microsoft Technology Differentiators

1. Project types for multiple Office applications and customization models Document-centric solutions for Word, Excel, and InfoPath; application-level solutions for Outlook
2. .NET Framework, Office XML file formats and VSTO data caching The .NET Framework provides numerous communication mechanisms (like web services and .NET Remoting) for connecting interactively with documents. The Office XML file formats and the VSTO data cache provide mechanisms that can be used for batch/server-based processing.
3. Actions pane and smart tags The VSTO actions pane greatly reduces the complexity of customizing the task pane by exposing a Windows Forms-based programming model; smart tag development builds on common .NET class design paradigms.
4. Integrated design-time experience Word and Excel hosted as design surfaces within VS enable the application of familiar .NET paradigms to Office development: host controls, managed controls, data binding, extended events, etc.
5. Manifest-based deployment and .NET Code Access Security Separation of code (which is part of a VS project), document, and solution binaries (managed .dll assemblies); only the solution binaries are deployed with the document, and VSTO solutions can be centrally deployed and updated.

Top 5 Project Examples

1. Your Project your project's elevator pitch
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Top 5 Information Sites

1. MSDN Site http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/understanding/vsto
2. VSTO Code Samples http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/understanding/vsto/codesamples
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Top 5 Blogs, Newsgroups

1. Eric Carter(VSTO Lead Developer) http://blogs.msdn.com/eric_carter
2. VSTO UE Team http://blogs.msdn.com/vsto2/
3. John Durant (VSTO Program Manager) http://blogs.msdn.com/johnrdurant/
4. Andrew Whitechapel (VSTO Program Manager) http://blogs.officezealot.com/whitechapel/
5. VSTO 2.0 Beta alias vstobeta
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