Aiming to turn its upcoming Office 11 business productivity suite into an extensible platform for business applications, Microsoft Monday unveiled plans for a set of tools that will allow Visual Studio .NET developers to build business-specific applications based on Word and Excel documents. Dubbed Visual Studio Tools for Office, the technology will allow developers to design Word and Excel templates with an underlying customer-defined XML structure, based on corporate, departmental or industry-wide schemas. In this way, developers will be able to build document-based applications with context-specific help and supporting information.
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