We have some exciting and dramatic improvements coming for developing Office based solutions.  As we all know, developing Office based solutions has been a bit confusing not to mention problematic (can we all say COM+ and PIA???).  Well, I’m very excited to say that it looks like we have some significant relief coming with VS2010.

·         Publishing to SharePoint – Up to now, if you wanted to put an Office based solution on to SharePoint, you had to manually upload the document and maintain locations between the document and the assemblies.  VS2010 is slated to provide a ‘one-click’ mechanism for publishing your solution.  The assemblies will be stored on the SharePoint server itself!!! (What a concept, huh?)

·         Customized and enhanced deployment packages – Up to now, if you created a solution that used both Excel and Word, you had to create multiple deployment packages and customization was still a challenge at times.  With VS2010 you will be able to deploy multiple solutions in a single package.  You will also have more deployment package customization features!

·         PIA-less Interoperability – OK, I saved the best for last!  If you develop these types of solutions, you know how much fun (sarcasm intended) you had with PIA (making sure it was deployed, interoperability issues, etc).  Now, with VS2010 and CLR v4.0, you can use a new feature that will embed the IOP interfaces directly into your application assembly!!!!  We can get rid of the deployment headaches as well as the 6.3MB PIA redistributable!

 There are loads of new features coming in VS2010 that I’ll get into later, but I just felt for all of us who develop Office based solutions should know that we have great things coming!!

 Happy Coding!