VSTO Excel Add-In with Visual Studio Express

Question

I want to create an add-in (a ribbon precisely) for MS Excel by using Visual Studio C# 2010 Express. I have searched and read about it here and here and somewhere else. However, when I want to create a new project I don't see any template as described, I don't see even the Office tab. Is it because I am using the Express edition? I think it shouldn't be. Because in this official comparison they say all editions are capable of office development.

What can I do to develop this add-in?

Answer 1

According to this post on the MSDN forum, Visual Studio Tools for Office are not available in the Express edition. I'm not sure where you're reading that on the comparison page (a quick glance said nothing about the Express edition).

Answer 2

A good alternative to VSTO for making an Excel add-in with .NET is Excel-DNA (which I develop). It is a free library that integrates your .NET assembly with Excel using the C API (as an .xll add-in). You can create user-defined worksheet functions (UDFs) for Excel (which are not supported by VSTO), and make ribbons, RTD servers. And you get easy deployment (a single .xll file) without needing any registration or admin rights, even for ribbons and RTD servers.

Another option, if you just want to integrate through the COM interface and not make UDFs or use the specialized Excel features, is NetOffice. The project give you a version-independent set of interop assemblies for Office and Visio, and allows you to easily make add-ins targeting different versions of Office. NetOffice can also be used as your COM interop library in an Excel-DNA add-in.

Both of these directions will work fine under the Express editions of Visual Studio, as well as in the free SharpDevelop IDE.