I just finished the first part of the VSTO 2005 pre-conference workshop and I really like what I am hearing. The level is very deep in the sense that Eric Carter has given already a lot of background information on the why's and the how's behind host items and host controls. So, no session that tries to convince us with compelling demos... the real stuff that we as developers like to hear and see. It is good to know what goes on behind the sessions in detail and why the dev team made some decisions. For example, those of you who have already done some work in VSTO 2005, probably know about the wrapper layer we use on top of the native host object model (e.g. Word or Excel). Interesting is that the dev team kind of de-coupled the PIA interfaces from the VSTO runtime libraries by not implementing the PIA interfaces directly. They actually have all the members mapped and expose all of the functionality this way. The reason for this is they want to have a good upgrade path to Office 12. VSTO 2005 code should work fine in Office 12 even if the Office 12 PIAs differ from the Office 2003 PIAs.