November, 2009

The InfoPath team is excited to announce the release of the Office 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 public betas! For the 1st time members of the public can download InfoPath 2010. Download it now from www.microsoft.com/2010!

Here are just some of the highlights in this new release. (For more details, see our earlier What's New in InfoPath 2010 post).

Quick and Easy Form Design

• Designing good looking forms has been made easier with our new page layout templates, layout tables, and themes.
• With our new out-of-the-box rules and improved rules management UI, you can easily add rules to validate data, format your form, or perform other actions with just a couple of clicks, and without any code. 
• Our new “quick” publish functionality allows you to publish forms in a single click (no more clicking through the Publishing Wizard every time you want to make an update to your forms!)
• New Controls include the picture button, signature line control and person/group picker which is now available out-of-the-box in the controls gallery.

SharePoint Integration
Over the past 3 years of product development, we’ve made huge investments in integration with the SharePoint platform to make it much easier to build rich forms-based applications on top of SharePoint Server 2010.

• Using InfoPath, you can now extend and enhance the forms used for creating, editing and viewing items in a SharePoint list.
• With the new InfoPath Form Web Part, you can host your forms on portal pages without writing a single line of code. 
• With SharePoint sandboxed solutions, forms with code can be published directly to SharePoint libraries without requiring administratror approval.
• Richer browser forms:Bulleted, numbered, and plain lists, multiple selection list boxes, Combo boxes, Choice group and sections, and Filtering functionality are now supported in browser forms.
• InfoPath Forms Services Administration and Management: We have invested in many improvements to make it easier to manage InfoPath Forms Services as a component of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. These include Powershell commandlets to automate tasks and SharePoint Maintenance Manager Rules to monitor the health of your server.

Introduced since the technical preview, InfoPath now supports connecting to REST Web Services.

Go download the beta now and send us your feedback using Send-a-Smile.

Enjoy!

The InfoPath Team

This week, Channel 9 launched two new training courses for SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 created by developers for developers. You’ll find extensive instructor recordings from top MVPs on how to develop against both SharePoint and office 2010.

 InfoPath is featured in:

• Office 2010 Developer Roadmap - Office 2010 Development Tools - This video provides an introduction to building solutions for Office and SharePoint 2010 using Visual Studio 2010, SharePoint Designer 2010, InfoPath 2010, and Access 2010.
• InfoPath 2010 and Forms Services - This unit which contains 4 videos covers development of custom SharePoint List Forms and workflows, publishing InfoPath Forms and connecting external data to InfoPath Forms.
• What is InfoPath 2010? - This video introduces the capabilities of InfoPath, the form design experience, InfoPath Forms Services and the InfoPath Form Web Part
• List Forms using InfoPath 2010 - This video covers how to develop a no-code, custom InfoPath form for a SharePoint List, publish the InfoPath form and then connect the InfoPath form to another List as an additional data source.
• Working Offline with InfoPath 2010 - This video discusses offline support for InfoPath 2010 with SharePoint Workspace 2010 and the online/offline synchronization process.
• InfoPath 2010 and Visual Studio - Developers can enhance InfoPath 2010 forms with Code Behind using Visual Studio Tools for Applications. This customization can be done in either C# or VB. This video also explains how SharePoint isolates custom code in its Sandbox environment.