Upgrade word 2010 vsto addin

Question

I have a old vsto addin project targetting office word 2010 and i used visual studio 2010 previously to work on this project .

Now some new maintenance requirements come and i have to work on it. But only visual studio 2015 is there in my machine and word is upgraded to office 365. Is there any way to upgrade the existing project and edit them in visual studio 2015

I can see new available project template for word addin in visual studio is now based on html , css javascript. So any possibility of migrating existing source code in c# to the new project template

Answer 1

It is certainly possible to work on the existing (2010) VSTO add-in in the new version of Visual Studio - just open it. If a migration to a newer VSTO code-base is necessary VS will notify you.

But you have to be very careful if the VSTO solution still needs to run on an earlier version of Word/Office. If that's the case, you'll need to make sure that all references to the Microsoft Office code libraries (Microsoft.Office.Interop.Core, etc.) have the property Embed interop types set to true.

But the new type of add-in that uses the Office JS APIs is something totally different - there's no way to migrate/convert code that uses the classic object model APIs to the new APIs. But, depending on what your VSTO add-in does, it's possible you don't even want to consider it (yet). The Word JS APIs are incomplete when compared to the APIs available in VSTO (and VBA) - they don't cover the entire Word functionality. Migration to the new technology needs to be thoroughly researched and tested before going into production.