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I see that there is now a native ARM version of Visual Studio which is great as i use Parallels Desktop on my mac and the previous version of Visual Studio is painfully slow. I see some workloads are available and some are not: https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/search?space=8&q=%5BARM64%5D&stateGroup=active&ftype=idea&sort=relevance

One thing that is unclear to me is if it supports VSTO solutions. I know that the latest .Net framework versions don't support VSTO: https://github.com/dotnet/core/issues/5156 but I wasn't sure if there are any impediments of running the native ARM based version of Visual studio to run a VSTO solution on .Net 4.8 framework version.

Eugene Astafiev
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leora
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  • FWIW, Visual Studio for ARM only has 4 workloads available (16 for x64 version): ASPNET, .NET Desktop, UWP, C++ Desktop https://i.imgur.com/ZwhivYb.png Note although VSTO is not available, it doesn't necessarily means you cannot write an Office ARM64 addin using .NET 6/7 for example (or even .NET Framework 4.8 using ARM64EC), but Visual Studio won't be of any specific help, you'd have to redevelop some parts of VSTO using raw/manual .NET interop ... Not 100% sure, would need to be tested. – Simon Mourier Sep 02 '22 at 07:15
  • I've recently tested a Word VSTO .NET Framework 4.8 addin (built as Any CPU) in an ARM64 version of Word running on Windows 11 ARM64 version and **it works fine**. – Simon Mourier Sep 23 '22 at 05:50
  • have you seen my comments? – Simon Mourier Nov 28 '22 at 10:37
  • @Sam Mourier While it is extremely useful to know that the Add Ins themselves work in ARM64 I think the OP (and me) wanted to ask if those addi in can be developed using Visual Studio for ARM on an ARM machine? I don't see any workloads currently :( – Gaurav Ramanan Feb 01 '23 at 14:33
  • @SimonMourier how did you do this please? I have a suite of tools as VSTO and need to have them installed on a Windows 11 VM on M2 mac. – milano_jon Apr 27 '23 at 13:47
  • @milano_jon - as I said, Visual Studio 2022 for ARM64 has only 4 workloads, you can't use it to develop VSTO easily, otherwise I'd put all that as an answer, not a comment. But you can use Visual 2022 Studio x64 to develop VSTO (on another machine, Intel) and it will work on Office ARM64 on Windows 11 ARM64. – Simon Mourier Apr 27 '23 at 14:05

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No, it is not possible. Microsoft Office available for ARM-based processors doesn't support ARM-based COM add-ins (not emulated).

The Office apps utilize a new technology from Microsoft called ARM64EC, which stands for ARM64 Emulation Compatible. This technology allows developers to mix and match code that's built natively for ARM64 alongside code that runs in emulation. As a result, apps with dependencies that don't natively support ARM64 can run partly as native apps and partly in emulation.

Office has x64 code and legacy add-ins that aren't built for Windows 11 on ARM. With ARM64EC, Microsoft can rebuild large portions of the app to run natively on ARM devices, while the older components run in emulation.

Eugene Astafiev
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