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I used to be really interested in using VSTA (Visual Studio Tools for Applications) for an application I've been working on, but stopped following it for a while. Now, no matter how hard I look, I can't seem to find anything new about it. The VSTA blog hasn't been updated since 2009, and most links through the MSDN guidance on it are broken (they redirect to generic VS pages.) I found a download for it from the MSDN article, but it sends me to this page, where the download button is disabled.

Anyone know what happened to this product? Has the project just been silently abandoned?

Stephen Collins
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    Note to readers: VSTA appears to have somewhat turbulent history. Sometimes in hands of Microsoft, sometimes at Summit software. Sometimes available for download, sometimes not possible to be found. When reviewing answers below, I recommend check the date of the answer, because mostly it contains information current to that date reflecting the above. (Currently also the Wikipedia article is outdated for long time.) – miroxlav Jun 27 '16 at 08:38

5 Answers5

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If you want to install VSTA, and you have Infopath 2007 installed, go to add/remove programs and 'change' the office Infopath 2007 installation. From there, select 'Add or Remove Features ' > Microsoft Office > Microsoft Office Infopath > .NET Programmability Support > .NET Programmability support for .NET Framework version 2.0 > Visual Studio Tools for Applications (set this to "Run from my computer"). It is disabled by default on installing Infopath.

n00b
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  • This was the solution! Ridiculous how difficult it is to get just VSTA installed without Visual Studio. Anyway, once you've performed the steps described above, you can find the executable at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\VSTA.exe – Leon Bouquiet Mar 24 '14 at 07:35
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It's now supported again. The SDK can be downloaded here:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38806

There's also a document with it that shows an example host implementation.

VoteCoffee
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June 2016 UPDATE – VSTA is available again from the Microsoft

I came across this question in May 2016 and the only thing I found that all links mentioned in other answers were broken (...and still are) and there was nothing like VSTA available or even mentioned on the Microsoft website except of some very old blogs.

To my surprise, today I found available not only VSTA 2012, but also VSTA 2015

The search phrase was "tools for applications visual studio".

2019 UPDATE

Wollmich
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miroxlav
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I'm in the same boat - I've been looking to integrate some kind of customer scripting/customisation into our .Net app, and VSTA looked like a good fit, but I've not been able to find any useful resources. I even emailed Summit Software (who took over VSTA some years ago) to find out what's been going on, but never received a reply. The documentation and samples on their site are old and not much use to a beginner.

I did find the following Microsoft announcement (can't remember where though) from March 2012. It seems to be saying that Microsoft have now taken VSTA back:

https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=5F66468E9A011792!115&authkey=!ANFwY0TpEvwdfM4

Also, Microsoft recently released "VSTA 2012 RTM - Preview", but again no documentation - just a bunch of DLLs. It's all very frustrating.

Andrew Stephens
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There is a fair amount of information on Wikipedia at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Studio_Tools_for_Applications

The latest version is VSTA 2.0, which can be downloaded here: http://www.summsoft.com/VSTAInfReq.aspx

You can see a huge amount of information about it here: http://www.summsoft.com/

Bravax
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  • Dead link. But VSTA 2015 can be [downloaded from Microsoft](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=49032) – John Alexiou Nov 30 '17 at 13:47