January, 2007

It all started with a few bloggers a little before Beta 2. People started blogging about the Ribbon, the cool ASP.NET 2.0 platform and WSS 3.0, Excel Services, the Office Open XML File Formats and InfoPath Forms Services. Lots of great features to build solutions using Office as a platform!

Office development blogs are quite active and inviting for developers trying to learn what's new with the Microsoft Office system and diving more into specific products and technologies. When all this started, I added RSS feeds every week to Outlook until it became just a joke to have so many bloggers added to my RSS feed. There's hundreds if not thousands of people blogging about Office development and every day new blogs are born. I built a new list of Office development bloggers and a few days before launch, my list adds up to 70!

When I started posting lists of bloggers someone suggested that I should build an OPML list of Office Development Bloggers, so I did. You can download the OPML file here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=F2C2C7E9-5ABB-401B-AD32-FED03295B61D&displaylang=en

You can use Outlook, Windows Live or other OPML readers to open this file and add your favorite RSS feeds.

MSDN blogs: pending to add!

How could I leave them out: Kathleen McGrath, Paul Stubbs, and the new Microsoft SharePoint Designer Team Blog

Pranav's blog: You should check this one out, I hate me for not finding Pranav's blog before: This blog is all about Office Automation, VSTO, InfoPath and other programming stuff and the thing i believe on is "Real Stuff is Out Of The Box."

New blogs:

Make sure you check out Rob Barker's: Where in the "OBA" am I? and his first post.

I am sure there's more blogs out there that I didn't list here. If you have an Office development blog or know of great bloggers that talk about VSTO, SharePoint, WSS or anything else related with Office, please let me know so we add them to the list. You don't need to have an MSDN or TechNet blog, you only need to be passionate about development with Office products and technologies. The list keeps growing every day.

Community blogs: pending to add!

• The Zealot Corner guys
• Blog name: All About SharePoint - http://www.sharepointblogs.com/ssa
• Ricardo Magalhães - http://techtalkpt.wordpress.com
• Portuguese Community of MOSS and WSS - http://mosspt.officeisp.net
• Portal Integration: http://blogs.infosupport.com/porint
• Adding Visio Guy: http://visguy.com/

Patrick Tisseghem beat me to it (you are so fast man), but I thought posting three blog entries in the same day was crazy.

Today I will blog about a project that has kept us busy for a while: "The Office Visual How Tos."

We know that the internet has changed the way in which developers learn about new products, features, tools and technologies. People are learning more about Office development thanks to blogs and videos. Office development blogs are quite active and inviting for developers trying to reduce their learning curve for new enhancements added to the 2007 Microsoft Office system. Readers love short articles (1 – 3 pages) with code samples that show how to do discrete tasks such as Using Parameters In Dashboards, What About Workflow and ASPX Forms?, How To Load Win32 dlls Dynamically In VBA and the list keeps going.

On the other hand, we know videos are an excellent resource for evangelizing new technologies. Developers love to see things in action. We published some developer screencasts and the Office Developer Conference videos after Beta 2 and we got an amazing response. People enjoy this kind of content, and I don't know if you are, but I am a very visual person. Sometimes a demo says more than 10,000 words, specially if you are fast learner and have few time to explore new technologies.

So we built a v-team and created a new type of MSDN article and we named it "Visual How To."

A "Visual How To" is a new content type that combines some of the best elements of blogs, video, and technical articles by providing a brief (1-3 page) page of content. The idea is that developers have 2 minutes, 5 minutes, or 15 minutes to spend on a task. Developers can look at the code sample on the page (2 minutes), view the video (5 minutes), and explore the additional resources and other added benefits. We think this will help developers learn how to work with specific new features of different 2007 Microsoft Office system programs, servers, services, tools and technologies by providing different flavors of content to fit your learning style.

A Visual How To article includes four basic components:

1. Code It: The code sample. Tell me how to do it!
2. See It: The cool demo video. Show me how it looks in action.
3. Read It: Short article (blog entry like) with basic conceptual documentation. What do I need to know about this new technology or new feature?
4. Explore It: Tons of links to videos, blogs, articles, Channel 9 interviews and other how tos related to the same topic. Who else is talking about this or where can I find more information?

Finally, Visual How Tos provide MSDN Wiki support, so you can add links to related resources or comments to these articles.    

We built the first two based on most common How Do I…in Word 2007 questions and you can find them here:

• Building Word 2007 Document Templates Using Content Controls:  http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb264571.aspx
• Building Word 2007 Documents Using Office Open XML Formats: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb264572.aspx

I know two articles is not enough but this is only the beginning. The good news is that we have a list of dozens and dozens of this articles that we plan to build in the next couple of months. Our list includes How Do I articles about Office Open XML Formats, Word, PowerPOint, Excel, Excel Services, BDC, Search, Workflow, Project Server, Outlook, InfoPath, Access and more. Of course, I'll let you know when we start publishing the next set of Visual How Tos.

You will be able to find them at the Office Developer How To Center or at the MSDN Library listed as Visual How Tos. Also, the Office Developer How To Center is the new section of the site where we will start listing all Office 2007 How tos, even when they are not Visual How Tos.

Let us know if you like the concept and if you have suggestions for must-have Office Visual How Tos. We are really excited about this, but you have the last word!

Just a little follow-up blog entry to let you know that the following developer references are now live on MSDN!

• Outlook 2007 Developer Reference: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb177050.aspx
• Word 2007 Developer Reference:  http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb243297.aspx
• InfoPath 2007 Developer Reference: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb229745.aspx
• Visio 2007 SDK: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms409183.aspx
• Excel 2007 Developer Reference: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb149067.aspx
• Access 2007 Developer Reference: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb149076.aspx
• Object Library Reference for the 2007 Microsoft Office System: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa432752.aspx
• InfoPath 2007 XSF Schema Reference: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb266409.aspx
• Project 2007 Developer Reference: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb238714.aspx
• SharePoint Designer 2007 Developer Reference: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb244127.aspx

This is so exciting!

It's our lucky day! This was supposed to happen later this week, but some of the launch surprises arrived ahead of time.

I am glad to announce that the following developer references are now live on MSDN:

• Object Library Reference for the 2007 Microsoft Office System: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa432752.aspx
• InfoPath 2007 XSF Schema Reference: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb266409.aspx
• Project 2007 Developer Reference: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb238714.aspx
• SharePoint Designer 2007 Developer Reference: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb244127.aspx

By the end of this week we will publish the following ones:

• Access 2007 Developer Reference
• Excel 2007 Developer Reference
• InfoPath 2007 Developer Reference
• Outlook 2007 Developer Reference
• Visio 2007 SDK
• Word 2007 Developer Reference

We will publish the last two in the subsequent weeks:

• PowerPoint 2007 Developer Reference
• Publisher 2007 Developer Reference

I will be updating this blog entry as soon as we take them live.

Enjoy!

Happy New Year 2007!

I am little late to the party (again) and in fact this is my first blog entry of the year. Things are quite busy here in Office-land. We are getting ready for launch and finalizing details on new content that we will continue to publish this year. As always, we have more surprises for you.

Some I can't tell now, but here's two I can disclose now.

Office 2007 client developer reference available soon!

We will publish finally the Developer Reference documentation and object model diagrams for the following programs:

• Access 2007,
• Excel 2007
• InfoPath 2007
• Outlook 2007
• Project 2007
• SharePoint Designer 2007
• Word 2007

You will be able to find them inside the Office Solutions Development node of the MSDN2 library. I will let you know when they go live.

New Office Talk column series about the 2007 Microsoft Office system