Office 365 Development With Visual Studio 2017

Alternatively, the same options can be found in Individual Components tab of Installation Window under Development activities section, as shown below.

Click Install on bottom right side to continue the installation. The installer will show the progress of the installation as and when its being made.

Relax and have a cup of coffee and let the installer do the work.

Let’s also see what is the difference between Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) and Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio.

Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO)

It was launched earlier as bridge between Office and the Studio (as claimed by Microsoft) around the start of the year 2004, targeting Office 2003 development at that time.

image credit: internet source

Originally, it was launched as a replacement for VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) for working with Excel and Word, but later numerous advances and enhancements were added to it in the later versions. VSTO provides developers the tools to build on top of Office as a platform, using which you can develop add-ins for Word, Excel etc. in C#/VB.NET.

Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio

These tools were launched to provide Microsoft developers; the latest Office development features in Visual Studio. You can use Office developer tools for the following.

• Create Office add-ins (these add-ins have a small footprint compared to VSTO add-ins).
• Integrate Office 365 APIs into your projects.
• Create SharePoint add-ins.

Back to VS2017 now

Check Visual Studio installer now. It may have finished the installation, which you can know from its success message. If the installation is done, you can directly open VS2017 from the installer Window or go to run prompt and type Visual Studio 2017.

Once VS2017 opens, click Create new project link to create a new project.

Once the New Project Window opens inside VS2017, click Office/SharePoint node, as shown below.

It gives you 3 types of new project templates, as described below.

• If you click on Add-ins link, you will be shown the options given below.
  
  
  

You can create Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and SharePoint add-ins with this selection.

• If you click VSTO Add-ins link, you will be shown the options given below
  
  
  

In addition to Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint add-ins, with VSTO; you can also create add-ins for Visio, Project and InfoPath. Please note that SharePoint add-ins cannot be created, using VSTO.

• If you click SharePoint Solutions link, you will be shown the options given below.
  
  
  

You can create different types of SharePoint solutions for SP2016 and SP2013.

For the scope of this article, I covered till New Project Window in VS2017 only. What happens when you create new projects of any of these types as well as how to do the actual coding for Office development will be covered in my future posts.

Happy learning.