Office Business Application Development in VSTS 2010

Visual Studio 2005 delivered the first release of Visual Studio Tools for Office. Since then Microsoft Office development has become an integrated component of Visual Studio and
as Office moves to deliver a client and server experience so too Visual Studio.
In Visual Studio 2010 developers will be able to build Office client applications that span multiple versions of Office, either 32 or 64-bit and deliver these as a single deployment package. The creation of the deployment packages is assisted through the provision of a deployment design surface that developers can use to graphically assemble the package that the end-user will install. Not only is the creation of the package easier by the ability to leverage “ClickOnce”, CD or Web installs enable developers and IT Professionals to use the appropriate technology to get these applications onto the end user machines.
The task of building the applications themselves has also gotten easier with the introduction of designer support for building flexible UI in either WPF or Fluent. With these designers developers will be able to customize the Office File Menu, Task Panes, Outlook Form Regions and the Fluent UI itself (such as the ribbon view). Additionally the task of consuming data in Office applications is made easier through improved data binding, integration of various Office data sources with LINQ and the ability to data bind to the Business Data Catalog. Finally applications will be able to interoperate with the many Office objects such as lists and action panes, and also participate with the Office Live Viewer.