I can see that Office 2016 for Mac now supports add-ins. How do I go about developing one?Will it be possible to convert existing VSTO-developed COM add-ins for Windows to the Mac version?
pnutsVisual Studio for Mac is a new Visual Studio IDE. It’s built from the ground up for the Mac and focuses on full-stack, client-to-cloud native mobile development, using Xamarin for Visual Studio, ASP.Net Core, and Azure.
taralex3 Answers
No, there is no tool for converting VSTO based add-ins (i.e. COM add-ins) to Office Apps. You need to develop Office Apps (Add-ins) from scratch.
FYI MS rebranded Office Apps as Office Add-ins at the Build#15 conference. See Get started with apps for Office in MSDN for more information.
Eugene AstafievEugene AstafievYes, you can use and develop Office Addins on Office 2016 for Mac.
Here's some instructions on how to Sideload Office Add-ins on iPad and Mac for testing
If you are on a Mac but don't have Office 2016, you can test and debug your add-in with Office 365 online (which should be accessible from any machine with a web browser).
These add-ins are different from the VSTO ones, in that they are built with web technologies (HTML, CSS, & Javascript). This has a number of benefits (cross-platform by default, large developer community, etc). I'm not aware of any way to convert the older formats to the new one.
For more details, here's the developer documentation for the new Add-ins API.
Visual Studio 2016 Professional
If you can create add-ons but it is very different from how it is done with VSTO here you have to load the add-in from a server and the task panel displays an html page with the required functionality although for example for excel it does not have the office API .js persistence you can not as with VSTO save the active Workbook locally and other restrictions
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Yesterday, Microsoft announced the release of Visual Studio 2017 Release Candidate as well as Visual Studio for Mac for the first time. Visual Studio for Mac will allow C# developers to build apps for the web, iOS, Android, and wearables.
In general, Visual Studio for Mac will have the majority of the features that can be found on Windows. However, it’s still in preview stage and changes may occur before its final release. This is somewhat of an expected move since Microsoft acquired Xamarin earlier this year and we are hopeful this will continue to simplify cross platform development.