Visual Studio Tools for Office, oh my!

Pieter van der Westhuizen, a professional freelance web & mobile developer and founder of Coalition Software.
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Pieter van der Westhuizen, a professional freelance web & mobile developer and founder of Coalition Software.
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If you want to see something really, really cool, start playing around with the new Visual Studio Tools for Office included in the latest Visual Studio 2008 release.
Something that used to be a real pain in the neck, when it came to integration work with office, were made extremely easy. The reason I started looking at integration with MS Office is I’m currently busy writing a funky little Helpdesk add-in for Outlook. It’s a simple app in-house IT teams can install for their users to submit support tickets, and this also allows the IT team and users to accurately track support tickets and their progress.
The application is accessed via a menu in Outlook:

The options for the Helpdesk add-in can be found by going to Tools>Options and clicking on the Helpdesk tab:

Yes, it’s not trickery! You can add tabs to the options form in Outlook! How cool is that?
So, go check it out…. You’ll like it.
UPDATE:
I’ve discovered a much more efficient way of developing for MS Office, check out Add-in Express.