Problem Creating Visio 2013 add-in with VS 2012

[spersels]

I'm running Windows 2008, Visio 2013 Pro, and have Visual studio 2012 premium installed. I've also installed the Visio 2013 SDK. I want to create a visio 2013 add in but after installing the Visio 2013 SDK I seen no project templates for Viso 2013 addins when I create new projects in VS. I see the template for a visio 2010 addin and have tried that but VS will not let me run it (dialog box pops saying I don't have the right version of visio installed).

What am I missing?
I have to imagine it's something really stupid.

Thanks ahead of time for any help

[JohnGoldsmith]

Hi,

You need the 'Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012' and this will give you the Visio 2013 project templates.

Have a look at this blog post for more details:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vsto/archive/2013/03/06/office-developer-tools-for-visual-studio-2012-now-available.aspx

...and the link here (under the 'Tools' section) which I think gets you to the same place:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/office/apps/fp123627

Hope that helps.

Best regards

John

[spersels]

worked like a charm!!!!   Thank You!!!!   

Quick followup - is there some way I could have learned about this or know this without needing to bother folks on this forum?

I literally spent hours on the net searching for solutions to this.    On the surface it seems like Microsoft's documentation on this is extremely thin or perhaps just poorly indexed with the search engines.  But perhaps it's more my lack of familiarity with the general topic of Office Development.

[JohnGoldsmith]

Well, the Visio Developer Center is probably the best place to start from a reference perspective and there are various blogs such as 'Office and Office 365 dev blog'  and 'Office development with Visual Studio' that you can follow.  In general though, I don't think that VSTO addins have received a lot of airtime recently.  The main push (for Office) is in 'Apps for Office / SharePoint'.

For the future, there was a recent blog post saying that the Office project templates will be back in Visual Studio 2013 by default (ie no extra download).

Glad your up and running.

Best regards

John