I'm pleased to announce that the official Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012 is now available to download! For VSTO developers, this release brings .NET 4.5 support and design-time support for Office 2013, along with general design-time enhancements and bug fixes to the VSTO Runtime (released separately a few months ago via our download center and Windows Update; see KB 2796590 for information regarding the Runtime). We also heard your feedback from "Preview 2" of the tools, including the request to bring back the VSTO Runtime Bootstrapper into VS 2012 -- it is now back in the product.
Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012 also includes tooling for the new apps for Office and apps for SharePoint projects, improvements to SharePoint Workflows, and more. You can read the official announcement for apps-related tooling on Soma’s blog post.
VSTO Office 2013 design-time support in Visual Studio 2012.
Note: Now that's we've added .NET 4.5 support to 2013, we've properly re-categorized the templates in the "New Project" dialog according to the .NET framework version that they support. So, if you're looking for the Office 2010 templates after installing the latest tools, be sure to adjust the ".NET Framework" dropdown to ".NET Framework 4.0". Again, to recap, both the 2010 and 2013 templates support .NET Framework 4.0, but only the 2013 templates support .NET Framework 4.5 -- and the "New Project" dialog respects that categorization.
I hope you enjoy using our new tools! If you have any questions or comments, please don't hesitate to reach out to us.
- Michael Zlatkovsky | Program Manager, Visual Studio Tools for Office & Apps for Office