Microsoft Releases New Visual Studio Tools

Microsoft Corp. Monday announced the release of its Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System, which can help developers build applications for the Microsoft .Net environment.

The new tools enable developers to create solutions in a familiar environment that take advantage of Microsofts Visual Studio .Net 2003 and the .Net Framework, the company said.

Using Microsoft Office and the new tools, developers can write applications in Visual Basic .Net or C# .Net that support Web services and other modern technologies such as XML applications and business processes. The new tools also allow programmers to use Visual Basic .Net and or Visual C# .Net to write code that will run behind Word 2003 and Excel 2003 documents.

/zimages/6/28571.gifA recent survey found that Visual Basic developers are taking a close look at .NET as well as the Java alternative. For the results of the poll and an analysis of the findings,click here.

Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System expand upon the ground work Microsoft laid for developers with Visual Basic for Applications, which enabled developers to customize Office applications.

Microsoft priced the toolset at $499 and $199 for upgrades from previous versions of its tools.

Discuss this in the eWEEK forum.