September, 2006

I'm in Paris, getting ready for another MOSS deep-dive lab this week, and I just went through all my RSS feeds. Here are a few cool things I came across from the last couple of days ... Speaking of MOSS, Bill Simser posted a link the the European European Sharepoint Conference's web site, which is -- of course -- a public-facing MOSS site. Maybe the hardcore Sharepoint developers can tell at a glance, but it fooled me. Nice work. Bart Gunneman (one of my buddy Wouter's colleagues over at InfoSupport...

The release of the VSTO 2005 SE Beta ("Cypress") has given developers a way to build application-level add-ins for either Office 2003 or Office 2007. But the SE version is not a superset of the VSTO V3 ("Orcas") functionality, and some people (me, for instance) have found the differences a bit confusing. Wouter van Vugt has posted a simple table that shows which VSTO version does what , with links to where you can learn more about about the technologies involved. Nicely done, Wouter -- I'll go...

We're putting on a MOSS developer workshop at the Munich MTC this week, and I've been too busy to blog much while we're here. But I took a few photos today so I thought I'd share them: Dinner this evening was at Erik's, a cool little Italian restaurant in nearby Ottenburg recommended by our host Sebastian Weber of the local DPE team. The ISV partners attending the workshop are all working on projects built on Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007. It's interesting to see the wide variety...

We Americans are a bit spoiled when it comes to software localization issues. (And a few other things. :-)) Most of the products we use are from American companies -- my employer in Redmond, for instance -- so we can just stick with the language defaults and work in English all the time. When you travel to countries where other languages are spoken, though, things can get complicated. Web sites on the computers you use default to the local language, and that can be really confusing. I can guess...

Now that Office 2007 Beta 2 Tech Refresh is out, it's time to get serious about learning Office 2007. And the best way to learn Office quickly is to go straight to the horse's mouth, as they say in my home state of Montana. In other words, talk to the people who created Office. That way you can learn why and how , in addition to what and when. The Office team is blogging like never before, and some new blogs have just come on-line recently. Here's a recap of some of the best places to learn more...

One of the cool things about being a technical evangelist is that you get to talk to partners (i.e., software developers who work with Microsoft technology) about the technical details of the work they're doing. Sometimes we're teaching them what's new from Microsoft, and other times we're the students, learning about creative things that our ISV partners are doing with our technologies. Thursday afternoon I had a chance to experience the latter, when Michael Scherotter of MindJet demonstrated...

Tomorrow the Beta 2 Tech Refresh build of the 2007 Microsoft Office System will be available for public download. Like many folks here on campus, I'm already running this build, and it's a solid upgrade from Beta 2. There have been a bunch of bug fixes (that's what betas are for!), and the user interface is now feature-complete. The differences between the look and feel of this release and the RTM version should be pretty minor. Jensen Harris has a nice wrap-up of the UI changes between B2 and...

For a great example of the potential of Office Business Applications , check out the Accruent demo that's now up on Channel 9. It's a recording of Ben Riga's presentation at the Worldwide Partner Conference this summer, in which he covers a wide variety of OBA development and integration opportunities: an Office front end featuring ribbon customization and customized task panes, a MOSS 2007 back end, Excel Services, dashboards, XPS and rights management, WPF, and even Virtual Earth and Windows...

If you've ever worked on documents that require a great deal of collaborative editing -- contracts, documentation, marketing materials, etc. -- you've probably used revision tracking. The ability to track what was added, edited, or deleted from a document, and who made the change as well as when they made it, can be a big time-saver and help assure a very high-quality document in the end. Historically, revision tracking was something that Microsoft Word a desktop word-processing application provided...

Wouter Van Vugt has posted some useful information about the issues and options for validating XML schemas in .NET applications: Validating Open XML documents with System.Xml - A WordProcessingML sample . If you're writing code that works with schemas that have circular references to one another, as occurs in some of the Open XML schemas, you'll want to check it out. Thanks for explaining this, Wouter! On a related note, Wouter has a great series of articles about working with WordprocessingML...