Clinick's Clinic

RE: One Free Donut in my office

2004-09-30T23:42:00Z

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Mon Dieu!

2004-06-14T01:15:00Z

Yet again England snatch defeat from the hands of victory. The stress of shipping software doesn't even come close to being an England sports fan. Oh well I guess we just need win against Switzerland and Croatia - sigh if winning was something we knew how to do.

Eternal optimism springs eternal in the England camp no doubt

Where have I been for the last couple of months?

2004-05-27T05:10:00Z

Having a baby! Ethan arrived on April 5^th and is the most amazing thing to happen to us. Somehow he makes it wonderful to wake up at 5:30 and go to bed at Midnight J We’re getting more into the swing of things now so hopefully I can post more frequently to this blog

What is the document?

2004-05-27T05:09:00Z

Historically Office documents have been self contained and required storage on disk. This worked well in the unconnected Office world and still has a place for personal productivity in the .NET world but increasingly documents are becoming much more about the presentation of data in a rich way. The onset of XML as the storage mechanism for Office .NET makes the data/presentation paradigm even stronger since any application can introspect on an Office documents data without having to go via the Office object model to do so. The move to XML opens up considerable capabilities for Office .NET but it does mean that we have to rethink how documents are stored and viewed. For example, when you go to the internal budget site . http://budget, it provides you with a page that contains all your budgets. To the end user it looks like the server has a page with their data stored somewhere on the server but in reality the document is just a result of a query on the database with some presentation logic included. Imagine if the budget site provided you with an Excel spreadsheet containing all your budgets. You’d get to it by making an HTTP request which would include your username, the server logic would query the relevant database with your user id and then return the Excel content. The Excel document would never exist other than in the server logic that knew how to construct the spreadsheet. The document only ever exists when you ask for it, there’s never a copy on the server. It’s kind of like the Matrix – you think it’s there because you can see it, interact with it but in reality it’s just a creation of the server to fool you into thinking it has a document for you.

What does this all mean?

By freeing Office from having to have physical files on disk it becomes much more flexible, more attuned to the needs of the solution rather than the solution having to bend to meet Office requirements. For example: Imagine a customer tracking system for a life assurance company. The sales rep visits you at home and convinces you that he has the best life assurance policy for you. You agree and sign up with him. The sign up process takes some information about you (social sec number, address etc) in the sales force automation application on the sales reps laptop. The data gets entered into a local SQL database ready for replication when the rep connects back to the life assurance extranet that evening (Of course in the brave new world he’d be connected via his/her 3G cell connection and it would be immediate but hey rome wasn’t built in a day!). When the data is received by companies SQL server it creates a work item for customer services to make sure that the data is OK and that the rep is following the rules. This is mostly an automatic process done by the business application but some human input is required to double check potential anomalies (the data could have been input incorrectly, the sales rep could make this stuff up etc) Assuming the data is OK the system needs to print out a welcome letter to the customer and send them an email welcoming them to the life assurance company. To do this the system creates a new Word document, using the customer XSD and a transformation to get the cool layout features provided by Word, and prints it out.

Everything is going fine, the customer is happy for the first year etc. Seeing a competitors commercial on TV offering better rates the customer phones up the life assurance company and speaks to a customer services rep. The rep manages to deflect the competitors advantage and manages to upsell the customer onto a better life assurance policy. As a result they want to create a letter thanking them for their business and provide some more info on the benefits provided by the new policy. The customer services rep clicks on the generate letter hyperlink/button in their customer service app. The customer services application creates a Word file using the standard new business template based on the customer and policy XSD’s. The customer services rep gets a nicely formatted Word document on their screen, they add some welcoming text and print out the document. Once the document is printed the document can be saved back to the server. The save generates an HTTP request back to the web server which has custom code handling saves which actually takes the content of the document (which is structured now) and stores the info in the SQL database, the Word document is never stored on the server. If a user wants to see the correspondence with the customer then they go to the correspondence page of the customers services application and that provides a list of all the docs that have been sent to the customer. When you click on one of the documents it is recreated from the database and transformed into Word

Motorola Shows Off The MPx And MPx100 At MDC

2004-03-25T22:19:00Z

Ooh I So want one of these

Rey from MGN has done it again. This time he's snapping pictures of Motorola's MPx Family presentation. Both devices are based on WM2003SE, MPEG4, AAC, and DRM aware. The MPx will have 802.11b built-in, while with the MPx100 it will be available from a "Dedicated Accessory" and both devices will be VOIP Enabled. For all the details check out Rey's pictures of the presentation and all his hands on pictures of the MPx. (MPx100 pictures to come soon). I am still in shock over how small the MPx really is. Incredible. :D

Related...

[Smartphone Thoughts]

WSH is in the top 10!

2004-02-02T22:52:00Z

Alas the FBI top 10 Windows vulnerabilities :(

Given the current round of MyDoom virus attacks I've been reading up on what people think of Windows Security and Email (I was the email lead on working out what to do with what became Windows XP SP2) Dana posted an interesting write up on Windows Script Host (something I was responsible for in a dim and not that distant past) Dana has a good point that the security features in WSH aren't particularly well understood. I wrote an article ages ago that tried to demystify what's there. Hopefully the FBI will take WSH off the list and I can sleep easier at night.

Cool Music relations site

2004-01-23T17:47:00Z

It's Friday so we should start with something frivolous. Check out http://www.musicplasma.com/ It has a pretty interesting search engine that will find related music based on the band you type in. It must be pretty extensive since it even found some of Peter Torrs music and if you've had the pleasure of being close to his office you'll know how “diverse” (I'm being kind!) his musical tastes are

Finally a quiet small form factor PC?

2004-01-21T17:35:00Z

The inner gadgeteer in me has been looking for a small PC that's quiet. I'm just fed up with having a PC that sounds like concorde taking off when you turn it on. I need some piece and quiet in my Office and if I'm ever going to build my own HTPC then it has to be quiet. There's been a bunch of small PC's recently but none of them are really that quiet. Looks like Shuttle might have released something close to what I was looking for http://www.sfftech.com/showdocs.cfm?aid=482 Now if only it had an AGP slot but a Radeon 9100 is pretty good for the moment

10 weeks til I have to grow up

2004-01-21T01:58:00Z

We're expecting our first baby in April and it's super exciting yet scary as heck all at the same time. I can't wait although quite how having a baby and starting a web log will work out I don't know. Many postings at odd times of night I guess. Oh well I think it's pretty easy being the expectant Dad compared to what my wife has to go through right now :)

If you ever wondered what it was like to be @ Microsoft doing software

2004-01-20T23:07:00Z

This article is a nice overview and gives you a great taste of what it's like. I've shipped stuff in Windows for the last 3 versions and it was a blast (albeit a tad stressfull) I loved walking into the Windows War Room and having to fight for bugs so that we didn't screw our users. The Ship guy in Windows, Iain McDonald, was amazing and always asked the right questions (damn it!) It was made all the more interesting since he's Australian and I'm British - much trading of insults before and after. Ahh the halycon days of Windows 2000 and worrying if VBScript would ever be as fast as JScript.....

Well it's about time that Clinicks Clinic came back from the dead

2004-01-20T22:54:00Z

Difficult to believe that it's been over 2 years since I wrote my last Scripting Clinic on MSDN but I really miss being able to tell the world about what the heck I've been working on here at Microsoft. We're getting to a point in our product cycle that I can finally start talking about what we've been working on and not worry about marketing coming down and shooting me so I figured I'd get on to the blogging bandwagon.

Anyway I hope to be blogging about the new Visual Studio Tools for Office quite a bit (along with my colleague/partner in crime Peter Torr) plus you just can't get the script out of me so no doubt there will be discussion about that too. All work and no play makes for a dull life so I'm sure that that there will be rants/raves about the gadget world along the way too (why the * can't we get decent cell phone coverage here in the US?)

Anyway enough for my first post

Andrew