VSTO Development - Key Improvements In VS2010 / .NET 4.0?
- by dferraro
Hi all,
I am trying to make a case to my bosses on why we should use VS2010 for an upcoming Excel Workbook VSTO application. I haven't used VSTO before but have used VBA. With 2010 just around the corner, I wanted to read about the improvements made to see if it was worth using 2010 to develop this application.
So far I have read 2 major improvements are ease of deployments and also debugging / com interop improvements ...
I was just wondering if there was anything else I wasn't aware of, or if anyone here is actually developing in VSTO and has used 2010 and both 2008 and could help make a case / arm me with information.
The main concern of my bosses is deploying .NET 4.0 runtime on the Citrix servers here... however it seems that with 3.5, we would have to deploy the VSTO runtime and PIA's, etc... So really wouldn't deployments be easier with 2010 because installing just the 4.0 runtime is better than having to install the 'VSTO Runtime' as well as PIA's, etc? Or is there something I'm missing here? Anyone here deploy VSTO app in an enterprise and can speak to this?
Also - I'm trying to also fight to use C# over VB.NET for this app. Does anyone know any key reasons why (except for my bias on preference of syntax) it would be better to use C# over VB for this? Any key features lacking in VB VSTO development? I've read about the VSTO Power Tools, and one of them describes LINQ enalbment of the Excel Object Model classes - however it says 'a set of C# classes'... Does anyone know if they literally mean C# - so this would not work with VB.NET, or do they just mean the code is written in C#? Anyone ever used these power tools with VB? I am going to download & play with it now, but any help again is greatly appreciated
Thanks very much for any information.
