(Further observations by our Summer Intern, Harish):

The blog by MSDN for VSTA is a good source for moving ahead with VSTA understanding... http://blogs.msdn.com/VSTA/ 

After the initial steps we should look at the zipped samples in the VSTA SDK.

The initial two applications (ShapeAppCSharp, ShapeAppMFC) do not integrate VSTA and do not require registration (Registring an applicaiton helps to build and debug the sample add-in, and to use the project templates included with ShapeAppBasicMFC to create our own add-ins.)

To get our hands on it we just need to unzip it and open the Project/Solution, Run the application through F5...

The Basic and Advanced samples integrate VSTA.  So we need to register the other sample applications in order to use the add-ins in them. For registering we need to run a java script that is located in the unzipped folder. The steps and commands for executing the script are:

• in the command prompt navigate to the unzipped folder where the script is located and then execute

  cscript SetupShapeAppBasicMFC.js

• each sample application has a similarly named .js script.