1/4/11 - Updated a couple of images and some of the code explanation Adam Cogan asked me a question the other day that asked (among other things) "How do you know if a doc has multiple sections?" In Word, of course, you can break a document up into sections by inserting a section  break...

Last week at the Australian Partner Conference , I presented a session on "New opportunities - developing with Office 2010 and SharePoint". Due partly to the target audience and partly to time constraints, I mentioned resources rather than delving into them deeply. I promised in the session...

There was a question on one of the internal lists today: "Looking for a no-brainer way to demo just adding a simple button to Office that goes to a URL." It’s going to work a little differently in Word & Excel than it does in Outlook. Word/Excel/Etc (apps with Ribbon) For a Word/Excel addin...

Fin asked me to write this week’s MSDN Flash editorial, so I did. In case you missed it, here it is. By the way, if you don’t subscribe to the flash, you should :). Sign up today ! It's been a real time for me with events. First the PDC in Los Angeles with over 6,000 developers (in case you missed it...

Craig’s been doing some great work around OBA and VSTO on his blog lately. As well as his recent presentation at SBTUG , he’s posted CLARITY: Office Business Applications (OBA) VSTO: VS2008 SP1 enhancements OBA: Office Business Applications resources VSTO: More on VS2008 SP1 enhancements ; and VSTO:...

I had a great time over the last couple of days hanging out with Christen Boyd and some of the other folk from the VSTO team here in Seattle. This culminated yesterday with a webcast of the session I’ll be doing here next week and then again at TechEd in Sydney. As promised, here are my slides from that...

I just got confirmation that the session I proposed for our internal technical conference, TechReady has been accepted. Deploying VSTO v3 Applications Building compelling, contextual applications on the Microsoft Office platform has become much simpler with the release of VSTO v3 with VS2008. Often,...

One of the common questions I get asked when I do sessions on VSTO / OBA development is "how can I target Office 2003 and Office 2007?" (I also get asked about previous versions of Office, but I have a less helpful response there). Mary Lee's done a great post about this very topic as has Andrew...

Following Kleefy 's not so unexpected announcement , I've taken over the Technology of TechEd Track for this year's TechEd Australia event. Here's the spiel that I wrote for the track. Come on a journey behind the scenes at Tech•Ed. This track will take you end-to-end in the technology deployed...

I had a great time presenting at the Perth SharePoint User Group last Tuesday. I've uploaded my deck to my SkyDrive if you're interested. The session talked about surfacing relevant information in the context in which it's needed. The example I gave is of a sales person who gets an email from a customer...

I went to see the clever folk at Vivid Group yesterday. Being clever, they've already established an internal user group of sorts, but they're often looking for compelling content to deliver. Fortunately, I was able to point them to some great resources. The various Visual Studio Training Kits provide...

The VSTO team have been hard at work both with their work on .NET3.5SP1 and on other things to enhance your VSTO development experience. recently, they released a series of OBA Sample Application Kits. Christin Boyd blogged about them on the VSTO team blog , as did Erika . If you’re looking for...

Alistair and I did a session at the recent SharePoint Forum on "Delivering Systems that the Users Don't Hate: Why Office and SharePoint will change the way you work" (which I'll be redelivering in a slightly technified form tomorrow at the Perth SharePoint User Group ). All of the decks and...

I got this question from one of our partners yesterday. The application developed by my client is an add-in for PowerPoint. One of the features it provides involves adding custom items to the context menu of shapes and pictures using the Office object model. This add-in works perfectly well in 2003,...

While the default mechanism for deploying VSTO v3 Add-Ins is ClickOnce, there there's now also a documented way to deliver VSTO solutions via an MSI installer. By extension, this should mean you can push it out via group policy (or SMS or whatever). Mary Lee's done a good post on this: http://blogs.msdn...

She's indefatigable! Erika Ehrli keeps posting these gems. Hot on the heels of my post about Office Object Model References , I discovered two great posts from her. Announcing the Microsoft Office Interactive Developer Map Version 2! ; and Open XML Format SDK - Class Diagram Explorer in Silverlight 2...

On an internal alias, I recently got asked a question that had come from a customer: "I wouldn't have harassed you like this, except that I've done heaps of searching and can't locate what I need. My company has a new CIO, a consequence of which is the need to now embrace all things Microsoft. ...

Anyone who's been to any of my recent presentations knows that I'm a passionate advocate of developing on the Office platform . The release of VSTO v3 with VS2008 was a big step forward in making Office development a truly first-class .NET development experience with its support for customising the Ribbon...

Matt Nunn sent this round recently - a couple of additions to the many Virtual Images you can download and just start using. I would like to announce that just prior to the holiday season we posted new public VSTS 2008 VPC Images. There are 2 versions of the VPC available: · The first VPC is what...

And it's where the VSTO2003 blog used to be :). Christin Boyd has posted a welcome message and that's all that's there so far, but with the likes of Misha Shneerson , John R. Durant , Eric Carter and Thomas Quinn contributing as well, there are sure to be some gems. Subscribe here .

While I love talking about the great developer experience in Office 2007 and VSTO v3, I acknowledge that there are plenty of developers who are constrained by their corporate SOE to targeting Office 2003. Even though we've been concentrating on the new stuff, we haven't forgotten you. Erika Ehrli has...

Back in June and July, I did a series of posts about the great Virtual Labs that are available for you to jump right into with no download and no configuration requirements. I posted about labs for: Business Intelligence Microsoft Search Solutions for the Enterprise Security SQL Server 2005 Upgrade VSTS2005...

From Khawar Ahmed on the OBA Blog : One of the OBA related news at TechEd Developer Barcelona was about the availability of S+S BluePrints. These are open source frameworks designed to make it easier to build S+S applications. These frameworks include source code, guidance, structured step-by-step workflow...

I got a nice note from Joe Hanna of vantage IT today following my presentation at the Office DevCon last weekend. In case you were interested, I thought I might let you know the results of attempting to build a .NET User Control and consuming it in a VBA project. Following your advice, I downloaded the...

I LOVE VSTO v3! As part of my demos for Graham Seach's Office DevCon , I've developed a VSTO v3 Outlook Add-in that adds a form region to an incoming e-mail if: The sender is in my contacts (based on the e-mail address); and The contact has a non-null, not-empty company name Here's what...