Smart Clients using Microsoft Office 2003

Visual Studio 2005 has a lot of features that support implementing Smart Applications using the Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) However, building applications that use the capabilities of Office 2003 using Visual Studio 2003 isn’t as easy as it seems. One might think that you could reference the COM DLL’s of Office Applications but when you do, you’ll find out that there’s a lot of late binding going on so ‘everything’ is of type Object. This makes building typesafe applications really difficult.

 

Luckily Microsoft has made typesafe DLL’s; these are called Primary Interop Assemblies.