VSTO
VSTO, or Visual Studio Tools for Office, or Microsoft Visual Studio Tools, is part of Microsoft’s Visual Studio .NET tools suite and supports the Microsoft .NET Framework. It is used by developers to write code for performing different operations on Microsoft Office Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoints etc. Microsoft Office must be installed on machine to use VSTO code.
Aspose for .NET APIs
Aspose.Total for .NET is a compilation of every .NET API offered by Aspose. Using Aspose.Total for .NET developers can create a wide range of applications, each leveraging the combined power of Aspose .NET APIs. Aspose APIs are designed with the philosophy of allowing developers to accomplish the results with the least amount of work, it supports a number of file formats including various Microsoft office file formats. For more info about Aspose .NET APIs, please visit Aspose.Total for .NET.
Unlike Office automation, Aspose relies on its own engine which is purely based on the .NET Framework. Aspose .NET APIs don’t require any other engine like Microsoft Office and developers only need to have the .NET Framework installed. For more info about server side automation drawbacks, please check Why Not Automation. Furthermore, Aspose .NET APIs support OpenOffice, PDF, image and more file formats in addition to Microsoft Office file formats.
Aspose for VSTO
Aspose for VSTO is a project providing source code examples to achieve a task using VSTO and Aspose .NET APIs side by side. The project has been hosted on BitBucket and CodePlex. The initial version of this project provides a few comparative source code examples. We’ll add more examples in the next iterations so developers can save time and quickly try Aspose and VSTO. Additionally, these examples will be helpful to migrate from Office Automation to Aspose. Below is the major outline of this project:
- VSTO Excel vs Aspose.Cells (Bitbucket variant)
- VSTO Words vs Aspose.Words (Bitbucket variant)
- VSTO PowerPoint vs Aspose.Slides (Bitbucket variant)
- VSTO MS Project vs Aspose.Tasks (Bitbucket variant)
- VSTO Outlook vs Aspose.Email (Bitbucket variant)
- VSTO Visio vs Aspose.Diagram (Bitbucket variant)
You can download the project from your favorite social coding web site and extract it. Use Visual Studio to open the project and run it. Each solution contains two projects.
- VSTO: Explains how some functionality is performed using VSTO.
- Aspose: Explains how the same functionality is performed using Aspose.
