John R. Durant's WebLog

On Jan 14 of this year a discriminating member of our audience on the Office Developer Center added the following feedback to our article Creating an Office 2003 Research Service Using the Amazon Web Service API . Here is the full text of his feedback...

NOTE: I am sorry that I couldn't update my blog for a few days. I still have proxy issues that prevent me from updating it while at work (even when bypassing the proxy and using the bland IP). All of the reponses to my post on the task pane a few days...

Today is my 2nd anniversary of working at Microsoft, all within the Office division. I like working for Steve Sinofsky and on down. This one of the few times I've worked somewhere feeling good reason to respect every one in my food chain line all that...

I remember back in 2000 I was messing with .NET (actually, I was architecting real systems (for gutsy customers) with the beta, but we'll call it 'messing'). In that time-frame, the focus was clearly on JIT compiling the code, and NGen (which has been...

I've done a lot of embarassing things in my life. I'm guessing I'm not alone. Fortunately, enough people move in and out of our lives that things fade and are forgotten (mostly...). Well, sometimes companies do things that are not easily forgotten, for...

This week we launched a new portal on DevX: Microsoft Office Professional Developer Portal . The DevX portal is a oriented around promotion. You will notice that nearly all of the links point back to site I manage: the MSDN Office Developer Center . There...

I am starting to realize that I need to post more than once a day. There's just so much going on. I'll kick it off today by saying that we just published a new and rather important article on the site: Convert VBA Code to Visual Basic .NET When Migrating...

Office Zealot is driving a lot of community involvment for Microsoft Office programmability. One of their efforts is a "pod cast". They record and interview and make it available for download. They just hosted their second one, and I happened to the be...

Via Scoble , I saw this item on another blog by Matt Raible that talks about what he calls the Fade Anything Technique (based on 37 Signals own Yellow Fade Technique ). Basically, when you are updating content on a page/web form (he uses the Basecamp...

OK- I wasn't going to mention it. I'm not sure why I didn't want to. Sure, the ABM crowd (Anything But Microsoft) will say I didn't want to mention AJAX because of my innermost fears (they are so dramatic, those ABM conspiratologists). Actually, I suppose...

So, I'm riding up the 520 this morning (taking it a little easy because I've had either a brutal cold or SARS for the past four days, I couldn't tell the difference), and I said 'Hello' to another cyclist climbing the hill (too many cyclists are notoriously...

Tech·Ed 2005 is only 13 weeks away. It's in Orlando, and that means it's going to be a great time. I love Orlando. The usual cadre of Office devleoper suspects will be there and ready to jam. OfficeZealot kingpin, Chris , partner-in-crime, Charles , and...

If you listened to the pod cast I did for Office Zealot last week, I was asked what kinds of technologies I am really into right now. I responded that I am eager to explore the possibilities of SQL 2005 XML and XML in Office. For example, using the enhanced...

As readers of my blog know, I am a huge supporter of the XML features in Word and Excel version 2003. Is the implementation ideal? No. Are there things that I would have loved to see added in before we shipped? Of course. I bet the program managers for...