Microsoft has just released a tool suite that bolts on to Visual Studio 2012. The new Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012 allow deeper control, integration, and app development and deployment options for Office 2013, SharePoint 2013, and cloud-based Office 365.

Following the new Modern design paradigm that is running through the latest generation of Microsoft products and platforms, the underlying technologies are assembled with ease of deployment to the Web and Cloud firmly in mind. HTML5, CSS, JavaScript are promoted for develop rich user interfaces, while OData provides solid and platform-agnostic networked data connectivity (the same OData API used with Windows Azure).

It’s great news for internal development teams that create and maintain Office solutions within their organisations, but also paves the way for small, medium and large commercial software houses to develop and publish apps to the Microsoft Office Store.

Want to know more? Check out “Project Napa”, where you can create apps for SharePoint and Office 2013 / 365 directly in your browser, with the option to drop them into Visual Studio 2012 later on, and keep on coding.