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Will ‘Cypress’ Gain a Toehold In the Dev Tool Marketplace?


By Mary Jo Foley
November 15, 2006 — 
How are developers taking to Microsoft’s latest iteration of Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO), designed to allow them to build on top of six of the core Office 2007 apps?

On Nov. 3, Microsoft's “Cypress” Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Office System—or, as it’s also known, VSTO 2005 Second Edition (SE)—and Office 2007 went gold. Developers have been kicking the VSTO 2005 SE tires, as indicated by the volume of postings to the Microsoft Developer Network VSTO forums. The overall verdict: VSTO 2005 SE offers some needed capabilities. But Microsoft still has plenty of work to do to make VSTO the ultimate Office development platform.

VSTO 2005 SE provides a number of features that the currently shipping VSTO 2005 product does not. The new release will be usable by developers with a stand-alone version of Visual Studio Professional; the current VSTO release is tailored to work with Visual Studio Team System and MSDN subscriptions. The VSTO 2005 SE release allow developers to build applications based on the 2003 versions of Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Visio, plus the 2007 editions of those same products, along with InfoPath 2007. Specifically, VSTO 2005 SE will let developers make use of the new Ribbon interface, custom-task pane and Outlook forms of Office 2007.

“Application add-ins [such as] Outlook and Infopath, [which] were previously supported, have been enhanced…and this is a great and long-overdue request,” said one tester, Mike Walker, development director at FWBS, a U.K. legal-software-solution provider (and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner).

In addition, “Cypress effectively makes the developer experience considerably more productive, in providing a wrapper to the core Office interfaces without the complexities involved in crossing the COM/.NET boundaries,” Walker said.

“Office as a platform has been strategic for my firm for many years, and with the transition of our original product to fully managed code, the interfaces involved in the past are very painful,” Walker said. “With the Cypress release, we’re now getting the tools we need to help deliver in a simple fashion the plumbing to Office to allow us to get on with the LOB [line-of-business] functionality needed by our customers.”

ACKNOWLEDGED LIMITATIONS
There are some shortcomings of the product, as Microsoft officials have acknowledged. For one, there is no visual designer customized to work with the new Office 2007 features. Testers are well aware of that limitation, said Charles Steinhardt, CTO at Venture Architects, a New York City provider of startup-focused services.

“I would like to see much better designer support for creating interfaces and events,” Steinhardt said. “No offense, but Microsoft is reminding me of how old I am! I feel like it’s a time warp to 1993 using Microsoft C++ and hand-coding toolbar resources. What is up with that?”

VSTO 2005 SE also does not support document-based add-ins for Office 2007 applications, even though the currently shipping version of VSTO does—but for Office 2003 apps only.

K.D. Hallman, general manager of Microsoft’s Office Platform Developer Tools group, is touting the upcoming VSTO “Orcas” as the version of the tool that will provide these kinds of capabilities. VSTO Orcas is designed to likely sync up, timing-wise, with the Orcas version of Visual Studio (expected to ship in 2007).

VSTO Orcas will accept add-ins from Excel 2007 and Word 2007, feature a visual designer for the Office 2007 Ribbon, Task Pane and Outlook forms region, and add support for ClickOnce deployment, Hallman said.

“Workflow is an area where we really need development tools,” she added. “Right now, it’s pretty much unapproachable for developers.”

Mary Jo Foley, a contributing writer to SD Times, has specialized in covering Microsoft for more than a decade.


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