Installing Visual Studio Tools for Office

To develop Visual Studio Tools for Office solutions, you must install Visual Studio Tools for Office, which is installed by default with several versions of Visual Studio 2008. You must have administrative privileges on the development computer to install Visual Studio Tools for Office, the Visual Studio Tools for Office runtime, the .NET Framework, and the Microsoft Office primary interop assemblies.

Visual Studio Editions That Include Visual Studio Tools for Office

Visual Studio Tools for Office is included with the following editions of Visual Studio:

• Visual Studio 2008 Professional

• Team Edition for Architects

• Team Edition for Database Professionals

• Team Edition for Developers

• Team Edition for Testers

For information about the hardware requirements for Visual Studio, see Visual Studio Editions and Hardware Requirements.

Required Installation Steps for Development Computers

Before you can develop and debug Microsoft Office solutions, you must install the .NET Framework, Microsoft Office and service packs, the Office primary interop assemblies, and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). For details about the installation steps, see How to: Install Visual Studio Tools for Office to Develop for the 2007 Microsoft Office System and How to: Install Visual Studio Tools for Office to Develop for Microsoft Office 2003.

The Microsoft Office primary interop assemblies must be installed into the global assembly cache (GAC) and registered before you can create or run a Visual Studio Tools for Office solution. You can then write managed code to interact with a Microsoft Office application's COM-based object model. For more information, see How to: Install Office Primary Interop Assemblies.

If you plan to create workflow solutions for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, you must develop on a computer that has Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 installed. For more information, see How to: Install Visual Studio Tools for Office to Develop for SharePoint Workflow Project Templates.

Visual Studio Tools for Office does not support installing Microsoft Office 2003 and the 2007 Microsoft Office system (or different versions of the same application, such as Word 2003 and Word 2007) side-by-side on the development computer. To develop solutions for different versions of Microsoft Office, use a different development computer for each version of Microsoft Office.

Required Installation Steps for an End User Computer

Before you can install and run Microsoft Office solutions, you must install the following prerequisites: .NET Framework, Microsoft Office and service packs, Office primary interop assemblies, and Visual Studio Tools for Office runtime. There are two versions of the runtime to support solutions for both the 2003 and the 2007 releases of Microsoft Office. For more information, see How to: Install the Visual Studio Tools for Office Runtime.

The Microsoft Office primary interop assemblies must be installed into the global assembly cache (GAC) and registered before you can run a Visual Studio Tools for Office solution. For more information, see How to: Install Prerequisites on End User Computers to Run Office Solutions (2007 System).

For details about these components and the installation steps, see How to: Prepare End User Computers to Run Office Solutions (2003 System) and How to: Install Prerequisites on End User Computers to Run Office Solutions (2007 System).

See Also

Tasks

How to: Install the Visual Studio Tools for Office Runtime

How to: Install Office Primary Interop Assemblies

Concepts

How to: Install Visual Studio Tools for Office to Develop for the 2007 Microsoft Office System

How to: Install Visual Studio Tools for Office to Develop for Microsoft Office 2003

How to: Install Visual Studio Tools for Office to Develop for SharePoint Workflow Project Templates

Other Resources

Getting Started (Visual Studio Tools for Office)

Change History

Date	History	Reason
July 2008	Revised primary interop assemblies information.	SP1 feature change.