John R. Durant's WebLog

Well, in a few hours I will be on a plane with my wife and four boys heading for the tiny Kingdom of Tonga for a much-needed vacation. I will not be blogging during that time, but I will be back at it in a short while, so don't remove my RSS feed from...

Here is a great piece of work written by none other than Office Zealot kingpin, Chris Kuniki , on how to migrate Word VBA to Visual Studio Tools for Office . A lot of people regularly ask questions about migrating from a version of a given Office product...

In my never-ending quest to find a decent blog tool, I am giving VisualBlogger 2004 (beta 2) a whirl. The set up was easy, even without an installer. The documentation is weak, but I didn't need it. That's a sign that the either the app is good or I am...

So, after I solved a proxy server issue, I was able to get NewsGator working again (after my machine rebuild- see this post for info on that). I am still pleased with NewsGator . It focuses on the most obvious features for reading and does them well...

If you have dreamed of creating your own Research Service and making data available offline, then things just got easier. If you are not sure what I am talking about, I am referring to the Research task pane in Office 2003: What's great is that you can...

In recent blog entry , Charles Maxson asked the question about the target audience for IBF. Which company can implement it? Who should attempt it? His response is, "Anyone who uses Office and could benefit from tighter integration with other systems....

If you have not heard the term "smart client", then get ready, because it is becoming increasingly common both inside and outside Microsoft. Sure, I work for Microsoft, but most of my time as a developer has been before I had a blue badge. I remember...

One of the biggest challenges for developers who need to automate programs like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook etc. is that they need to learn the object model learning about various collections and other objects in the target OM to do tasks. This is...

So, I spent some days rebuildling two of my machines in my office. One is my main dev workstation, and the other is a unit I use for meetings and for taking on the road. It's a Tablet PC, and it works pretty well. My main dev machine needed it most because...

So, I took the plunge and have been working with the information bridge framework for a few days now. What I have come to realize is that IBF's design is really about taking care of plumbing for you. Need a smart tag to appear in the UI? OK- make sure...

I have been doing some SharePoint development, and I am using a variety of little utilities to get certain tasks done. However, in many cases, the utilities are installed as part of an SDK, a toolkit or something else. For example, to install a Web Part...

I promised that I had an article that would publish soon in which I consolidate the details I sketched out in some earlier blogs. This article, which shows how to create reports from Outlook tasks using WordProcessingML (WordML). There is an article and...

When I first came to Microsoft (1 year and a couple of months ago), one of the first things I wanted to do was help developers who were curious about smart documents in Office 2003. Back then, the product was in beta, and beta 2 technical refresh (B2TR...