What do I need to create an "Office" project in Visual Studio 2008?

Answer 1

The standard edition of VS2008 does not contain the VSTO templates. You need the Professional version or above. Therefore, you will be limited to using the Shared Add-ins template for creating Office Add-ins.

For an introduction to creating Office add-ins using the Shared Add-in project template, see the following KB articles:

• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/302896
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/302901

If you go this route, and you want your add-in to be used in a real-world environment, you should strongly consider also using a COM shim for your add-in. For more details, see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb508939.aspx. This article also has some potentially helpful links to other topics about managed COM add-ins.

Ref.: VSTO templates missing in VS .Net 2008