John R. Durant's WebLog

For over a decade I have enjoyed so very much being a leading voice for custom solutions that integrate with Microsoft Office. The last 7 ½  years of that time have been as a Microsoft employee gleefully carrying my blue-badge with me all over the...

I just completed a much-needed 2 week vacation in Peru with one of my sons. While there, I wore my Office 2010 t-shirt as well as my Office branded hat, and it prompted some conversations about the products--- even while hiking over a mountain pass or...

As you all know the SharePoint Conference last year in Las Vegas was a great show (here are links to broadcasts of several of our sessions ). I followed the show with a ticket to see U2’s 360 concert (unlike any other spectacle in rock-and-roll). Since...

So, I was at TechEd 2010 talking a lot about Office 2010 solutions development last week and love was in the air…mostly because I gave out hundreds of t-shirts with our www.iheartmacros.com URL on them. I would say to people coming to our kiosk, “This...

Open XML was a big part of my first session at TechEd 2010 called, "Office 2010: Developing the Next Wave of Productivity Solutions". The thing that gets the biggest reaction is the Open XML SDK 2.0 "Productivity Tool"-- especially the ability to reflect...

I’ve talked with with many dozens of customers here at TechEd 2010 about Office 2010 and shown them a lot of demos at the kiosk. As they arrive I hand them a www.iheartmacros.com t-shirt (hugely popular, btw). Very often the response is: “This...

MSDN now features a special site (also accessible via www.iheartmacros.com ) dedicated to Microsoft Office VBA - an important part of the Office 2010 value. The site presents a clear path for technically savvy users to begin learning how to customize...

There's a great new article by Michael Desmond in Visual Studio Magazine called " Office Alignment: Why Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 are poised to unleash a new wave of developer innovation ". Read it and you'll get Michael's always engaging insight...

I just finished a whirlwind swing through Amsterdam, The Hague, Antwerp, and finally Vienna Austria. I've already blogged about the first three cities, but this last one is the focus of this post. I went to Vienna mainly to meet with some customers...

A number of people have found my post about getting started with SQL Azure pretty useful. But, it's all worthless if it doesn't add up to user value. Database are like potential energy in physics-it's a promise that something could be put in motion. Users...

I caught a train from Den Haag to Antwerp in Belgium on Wednesday afternoon. You can see the Dutch countryside in this short clip. Traveling by train to Antwerp. I used to live in Belgium when I was a missionary for my church 25 years ago, and I fell...

I've been running at a fast pace for the past few days, so I'm going to add a few posts here to catch up. Day 3 of the DevDays event in the Netherlands was a success. I delivered a session on "Open XML Solution Building With Word and Excel Services"....

I delivered a session today that describes what's new in Office 2010 for solution developers. It's a session that I have evolved over the past year. My core demos have also evolved, and I'm pleased with the impact they make. The session was well attended...

Nearly everyone starts learning anything new by beginning with something simple and adding incremental knowledge. One of the biggest challenges with Windows Azure and SQL Azure is that the simple beginning seems a bit more elusive. The "Hello World" application...

Here's a quick update. I was down at a nice reception at the hotel for the conference speakers when a door is violently thrown open and a guys goes running through and down the hall. Following closely behind was a security guard. I immediately took off...

It's been an eventful day here at Microsoft DevDays 2010, and the show hasn't even officially started! First item of business is to get to a hotel for rest and get some great food-not necessarily in that order. My flight was as good as one can expect...

I speak with customers every day about the productivity solutions they build using Microsoft Office. Rarely now do my conversations not include a discussion of Open XML. This is because it is such a powerful way to work with Office documents as a data...

Readers of the blog know that SharePoint Conference 2009 had some pretty memorable highlights . Now, we're excited to announce that five key Office developer sessions are now freely viewable online. Here's the list of sessions: What's New in Office 2010...

I just felt like doing a different kind of post today. I spent some time on camera yesterday as part of video you'll see when Microsoft Office 2010 launches. I didn't get as much make-up applied on this video, so I'm worried I'll look as tired as I felt...

Erika, the site owner for the MSDN Office Developer Center, announced today an important visual update to the site. There are brand elements all over in here that match our branding guidelines for Microsoft Office 2010. One could call it a purely cosmetic...

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace-these are common social networking sites/services that are on the tip of the tongue nowadays. Beyond their relative novelty, they've brought fresh attention to long-standing questions and engendered new ones. Recently...

In the next few posts I'll roll out a little project for Excel that uses Open XML and LINQ. The scenario for this little Office solution has to do with my massive collection of music. I've collected over 1000 albums of music both from CDs and from purchases...

Many of you have heard that we announced the Outlook Social Connector back at PDC 2009. The connector works as part of Outlook 2010, 2007, and even 2003, and it allows you to surface activity from your social media networks right inside of Outlook. With...

The Office Developer Atlas interactive training tool (built using Silverlight technology) is a great way for you to come up to speed on what developing productivity solutions with Office is all about. We've called it an atlas because it's designed to...

We introduced Excel XML Map objects in Excel 2003. We carried those forward into Excel 2007 and, of course, into Excel 2010. I recently stumbled on an Excel developer blog by Roy Maclean , and I was really glad to see him exploring a scenario and sharing...