Microsoft has announced updates to Napa and LightSwitch, its new tools for working in Office and SharePoint.

Napa is the replacement for VBA that Microsoft started pushing back in July, and which is being described by Microsoft as a lightweight, in-browser companion to the full Visual Studio rich client. The come-on for developers is the ability to sell apps through Microsoft’s new Office store. Preview 2 of Napa is now available for download and you can use it from within Visual Studio 2012. The improvements to this edition mean you can now publish apps to SharePoint, and a variety of improvements to the editor. You can try Napa out at http://dev.office.com.

The second preview of LightSwitch can also now be downloaded. LightSwitch is the HTML client for Visual Studio 2012 that is being thrown in with Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012. The new preview lets you develop data driven apps for SharePoint ‘using the new web standards-based apps model’ according to a blog post by Corporate Vice President Soma Somasegar.

The new version of LightSwitch means you can build touch-oriented business apps with HTML5 that run across different devices. The new version also supports the creation of data-driven apps for SharePoint.