Integrating VSTA 2.0 w/ Visual Studio 2005

Integrating VSTA 2.0 with Visual Studio 2005 is nearly identical to using VS 2008 with these exceptions:

1.  Installing VSTA 2.0 includes .Net framework 3.5.  The required System.Addin base classes are only available in .Net 3.5

2.  The VSTA 2.0 proxy layer (or automation layer) is auto-generated C# source code using C# 3.0 language features not available in VS2005.  This requirement can be cleanly removed by converting the C# source code to compile with C# 2.0 with a macro provided by Summit.

A more complete discussion and a link to the conversion macro are available on Melody’s blog:

Using VSTA v 2 with Visual Studio 2005