VBA/.NET - again..

[darren]

I asked last week (the week before?) about retrofitting VBA to a mature C++
application, allowing the users access to a customization tool, and the
developers to a unit testing tool.

It appears to me that little development has been happening with VBA. I
have also noted that with products such as 'Visual Studio Tools for Office'
that applications are becoming able to dynamically load .NET add-ins, but
without an IDE in the application. Does anyone know, or are they willing to
comment on whether this is the direction Microsoft is going in?

This being the case, it would seem that we should be creating a type library
for our application, have something like the 'add-in manager' and be able to
load correctly registered DLLs when required.

There seem to be bits and pieces of code about that show the basics
required, but I am concerned about the size of this as a project.
Does anyone know if there is anything about that would simplify this
process for me?
Does anyone know if (and where) I could find some technical
information/white papers on how Microsoft has implemented this functionality?

Thanks,

Hugh