I was searching for an installer for VSTA (Visual Studio Tools for application). Looks like there is no separate installable for VSTA (Visual Studio Tools for application). After a bit of research, I've learnt that VSTA is embedded inside Office 2007 Professional or higher. We can install VSTA by performing the following steps
Control Panel ---> Office 2007 -- > Change -- > Add or remove features
This will display all the Office 2007 suite of products and its corresponding features
Each of the office products like Word, Excel and InfoPath etc has the support for .NET Programmability support. By default the programmability support is not enabled. We need to enable Programmability Support for the relevant products. This would bring the necessary VSTA support for IDE and handles all the application-level events of office. So VSTA becomes the logical replacement for the legacy VBAs.
What is Enterprise Library?
Enterprise Library is a collection of reusable software components (application blocks) designed to assist software developers with common enterprise development challenges (such as logging, validation, caching, exception handling, and many others). Application blocks are a type of guidance encapsulating Microsoft recommended development practices; they are provided as source code plus documentation that can be used "as is," extended, or modified by developers to use on complex, enterprise-level line-of-business development projects.
Goals for Enterprise Library
Enterprise Library is a collection of application blocks intended for use by developers who build complex, enterprise-level applications. Enterprise Library is used when building applications that are typically to be deployed widely and to interoperate with other applications and systems. In addition, they generally have strict security, reliability, and performance requirements. The goals of Enterprise Library are the following:
Consistency. All Enterprise Library application blocks feature consistent design patterns and implementation approaches.
Extensibility. All application blocks include defined extensibility points that allow developers to customize the behavior of the application blocks by adding their own code.
Ease of use. Enterprise Library offers numerous usability improvements, including a graphical configuration tool, a simpler installation procedure, and clearer and more complete documentation and samples.
Integration. Enterprise Library application blocks are designed to work well together or individually.
What's New in v4.0?
This release of Enterprise Library includes the following:
- Integration with the Unity Application Block
- Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) 2.0 support and improved instrumentation
- Performance improvements (particularly, in the Logging Application Block)
- Pluggable Cache Managers
- Visual Studio 2008 support
- Bug fixes
Note: existing public APIs (v3.1) are still supported.
The Application Block Software Factory and the Strong Naming Guidance Package are not included in this release but are available as a separate download. Thus, there is no longer a dependency on Guidance Automation Extensions (GAX).
For the detailed list of all changes, see About This Release of Enterprise Library.
Getting Started
If you are new to the Enterprise Library:
- read the Introduction to the Enterprise Library;
- download, compile and run the Quick Start samples-study the code;
- read through the related Quick Start Walkthroughs and "Key Scenarios" sections of the documentation;
- practice the Hands-On Labs;
- join the webcast in June 2008 (the exact date will be announced on the Enterprise Library landing page).
If you already know and love the Enterprise Library:
- Check out the change log for this release;
- upgrade to V4.0-no code change is required-simply update the references to the corresponding application block assemblies and to the common assemblies;
- download the updated Quick Starts and run through the Unity-integrated examples to get the flavor of new dependency injection style of using the Enterprise Library;
- join the webcast in June 2008 (the exact date will be announced on the Enterprise Library landing page).
The User Guide, Samples and Walkthroughs for the Visual Studio 2005 extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, v1.1 has been released. The Visual Studio 2005 extensions for SharePoint were released back in Feb 2008 and an update for Visual Studio 2008 is planned for release in June 2008.
The user guide represents approx 200 pages of documentation applicable to both the 2005 and the 2008 release of the Visual Studio extensions for SharePoint. The user guide contains an introduction to using the Visual Studio extensions for SharePoint, and it contains walkthrough samples for each of the project templates that are supplied with the Visual Studio extensions for SharePoint. These are the document sections:
1. Starting out in SharePoint Development
An introductory guide.
2. Walkthrough of the VSeWSS User Interface including the WSP View
A description of the user interface elements. The WSP view is a new tool panel which helps you put together the deployment package for SharePoint projects.
3. The Team Site Project
A walkthrough and complete sample.
4. The Blank Site Project
A walkthrough and complete sample.
5. The List Definition Project
A walkthrough and complete sample.
6. The Web Part Project
A walkthrough and complete sample.
7. The Workflow Projects
A walkthrough and complete sample for each of Sequential and State machine workflows. Although these project templates are not shipped with VSeWSS we added them for completeness. They are included in Visual Studio 2008 and are available for Visual Studio 2005 in the Windows SharePoint Services SDK.
8. Project Item Templates
A description and usage for each of the project item templates. Essentially the project templates are largely empty templates with default project items contained.
9. Best Practices with VSeWSS
A collection of suggestions for working with the tool.
10. Changes from 1.0 to 1.1
A list of what was improved. There were lots of improvements from V1.0 of VSeWSS