A Functional Deployment Template

We had been using Excel spreadsheets to build out our deployment plans. The biggest chunk of the plan was usually all the database scripts (I prefer listing them separately for better troubleshooting if one fails). Perhaps there is a better way to deploy database changes (SQL Server), but I'm not aware of it.
Anyhow, spreadsheets were not up to the task for a couple reasons:

• We wanted to be able to have plain written documentation (paragraphs) in addition to some kind of "steps" checklist (we needed to start making complete deployment documents). It's possible to to this in Excel, but certainly not optimal.
• Editing large scripts in Excel cells can prove clunky. A line length limit makes it nearly impossible (if you try to paste in a script with a line too long nothing happens - no error and no pastey) to edit some large scripts.
  

We thought about several possible tools, but what we really wanted was a Word template with some tables in it (for steps). But one of the columns of the table needed to have a button (or something) that would pop up a separate editing window for editing the scripts. The edited script would then "collapse" back into it's cell (basically like an Excel cell but with a better mechanism for editing large scripts).

I searched for a fair amount of time and came up with absolutely nothing. I did find a few deployment templates, but nothing with any functionality to them. So I went ahead and implemented such a beast using VSTO over a Word template. Perhaps someone will stumble upon this and find it useful. Implementing it was more challenging than one might think. Just like anything else, if you're not very familiar with VSTO, even small things are going to be difficult, but dynamically creating and persisting WinForms controls is actually sorta tricky.

Anyway, here's what it looks like: