John R. Durant's WebLog

Two of my colleagues, Sergei Gundorov and Clark Hamilton, have been busy, busy, busy. They did a three-part series of articles on Excel, and the third one is perhaps their best: Part 3: Replicating Excel 2003 Formulas to SQL Server The basic gist is using...

Crazy, I know, but the truth is: we provide only small snippets of samples for a lot of the methods in the Office OMs. If you ask the writers who put this together, they will tell you they would love to do more elaborate samples, but when you are staring...

I was trying to figure out something with respect to AutoCaption in Word, and I found MakekTips , a site with tips for Windows, other things Microsoft, and a sprinkling of general technologies like HTML. There is a fairly well stocked area just for Word...

As you know, I call a legacy system "One that works". That said, I am certainly not against upgrading or even tabula rasa software development either. In fact, making incremental and somewhat more dramatic improvements to a legacy system is often the...

I have been doing a number of searches this morning on MSN Search, Google, and other engines just to get an anecdotal read on search results for Office programmability topics. I looked for things like certain types of add-ins and other subjects. What...

I received a mail from Dino Chiesa (his last name means 'Church' in Italiano!) with a l ink to his blog on .NET and Interop (and he doesn't mean just COM interop, my friends). I like the focus of his blog, and he writes well. I'm working on a transform...

OK- I know I am behind. It's been a little nutty around here since boy #5 arrived (and I had to shuttle my kids to 3! baseball games last night at three different parks at different times). Anyway, today, I am getting back into the groove. My buddy...

As I have mentioned before, even though a huge portion of code "out there" in solutions for Microsoft Office is COM-based (VBA or VB6) code the unmistakable trend is toward writing in the .NET Framework targeting the Office OM's. However, up to this point...

I am perhaps a bit late with this one, but I was reading about the Acid2 test on slashdot . I need to dig in a little more to understand the specific requirements of the test. I've done a ton of browser programming and the only thing I have learned...

I have exchanged a number of emails over the past couple of years with Stephen Bullen . He and I met up at an event here about 18 months ago, and what struck me is how sweeping his thoughts are about Office development generally. Sure, he's an Excel expert...

I've been meaning to make sure I gave this a plug for a few days, but it's been busy. We are working hard on VSTO, and schedules are (no surprise) always tight. I'm developing a cool solution sample in VSTO, and it does some funky XML stuff that I'll...

I haven't blogged for a few days because my fifth son was born on Friday morning. I expect to be tech-blogging again tomorrow. Rock Thought for the Day: Paul Simon- "Born at the Right Time" Rock On

Well, today marks my first day on the job in the Visual Studio Tools for Office tools team. I actually only have 24 emails in my inbox right now (should last for about 30 or 40 minutes). My old group and team gave me a huge send-off, and it was very...