Published Friday, July 27, 2007 9:28 AM by martin

Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2

Just in case you didn't already know, we've released Beta 2.  You can download various different VS2008 images from here.

I just installed it (I went for the Team Suite version).  The first thing I always check is the support for Office, so imagine my surprise to find that most of the Office 2007 project templates were missing!  On closer inspection, I found that when I set the target .NET Framework version to v3.5 they all came back again :-)

I went right ahead and created a Word 2007 add-in, and dropped a ribbon designer into the project.  Compared with Beta 1 there's a lot more to play with here - all of the ribbon controls that were available in VSTO 2005 SE are here in the toolbox now.

One other thing: I hit F5 and Word starts up, and there's my ribbon!  There was no setup project created, so I didn't "install" anything, and yet Word already knows about my add-in.  How do they do that...?! ;-)