How Visual Studio 2012 will be supported by the upcoming Add-in Express releases
As early as this spring we announced the next generation of our flagship product – Add-in Express for Office and .net. The 2 main features included in this major release are support for coming Visual Studio 2012 and Office 2013. In this and in a few next posts I am going to highlight the main features that are worth attention of all developers who are set to support Office 2013.
Visual Studio 2012 comes first
I think everyone has guessed that VS 2012 is coming earlier than the next Office. We have supported VS 2012 starting from its 1st public beta and synchronized our releases with all subsequent public releases of Visual Studio. We spent most of the time on making the next ADX version fully compliant with the Visual Studio 2012 UX Guidelines. However, with the permission of Microsoft guys we preserved Office theming for all in-place designers such as ribbon tab designers, command bar designers and Backstage view designers.
Visual Studio 2012 and all Office versions – 100% compatibility
As before, we are consistently adhering to our key idea – any version of Visual Studio shall enable you to develop plug-ins for any available Office version. So, using Visual Studio 2012 you can develop extensions for all versions of Microsoft Office starting from 2000 through 2013. However…
Deployment with VS2012 – be careful!
I hope it is not a surprise anyone that VS2012 doesn’t support setup projects from previous VS versions. That is why, you will have to re-create setup projects based on WiX or InstallShield (naturally, you will need to install WiX or InstallShield first). It goes without saying that publishing with ClickOnce or ClickTwice is fully supported.
Your existing projects and the next ADX – 100% compatibility
I know there are going to be many questions and that is why I am writing again – we do stick to our core idea – 100% compatibility. So, if you are going to move to Visual Studio 2012, do not worry. Just use the next version of Add-in Express.