Alright, I answered another question in a newsgroup, but the question posed, while technical, gets an A+ for honesty. It starts like this: I'm tearing my hair out at the moment trying to work out why the above isn't working! Now, the "above" is...

I recently saw a post on the microsoft.public.office.xml news group wherein was asked: -------- When I save a word document as XML, it seems that o:DocumentProperties/o:Pages always comes out as 1. I have tried doing "update fields" and saving in...

One of the most over-looked tasks in .NET development is...obfuscation. BTW: it comes from the Latin word "to darken" (I knew my 10 years studying Latin would help me in a blog entry some day!). Obfuscation is about making it effectively impossible...

Today, Eric Carter blogged about Small Changes: VSTO host item and host controls & InnerObject . Basically, whereas key classes in VSTO used to derive from Microsoft.Office. Interop .<whateverapp>.<whateverclass>, they now do not. Going...

One of our partners asked around on an internal discussion alias looking for a way to disable the little buttons that appear on the horizontal scrollbar in Word: The way to disable these buttons is by overriding the Word Commands via an empty VBA macro...

Regular readers of my blog will rightly wonder where Part 1 of this topic is. Well, I didn't write it. OfficeZealot kingpin, Chris Kunicki, did in a recent post about resources to aid in migrating from VBA to VSTO . It's a great topic, but sadly, there...

OfficeZealot kingpin,Chris Kunicki, interviews Jan Tielens about SharePoint . Jan is from Belgium, a place I treasure as I used to live in Brussels and Herstal (near Liege) when I was a missionary for my church in 1985 (ahk! I'm 39 already!). The podCast...

The demo I did at Tech Ed 2005, Creating an Outlook Task Add-in Solution with VSTO 2005 , went off very well (I ended up receiving the Roku SoundBridge 2000 because of the good evals, so thanks to those who took the time to fill them out!!). Since then...

On Sue Mosher's amazing Outlook site , there has been a discussion about creating ActiveX controls in managed code and running them on an Outlook form . It is a completely unsupported scenario, but that never stops a dyed-in-the-wool developer. I had...

We recently had a customer inquire about a WordProcessingML -> CALS conversion. Well, I had never heard of CALS, and neither my immediate colleagues. So, it was digging time. As a side note: when customer questions make it to the product team, we can...

I have learned so much about Office via the XML formats in Office 2003 that I probably would have overlooked just working with the OM. My latest revelation (the smarties out there already knew, but I never claimed to know everything!) is about Panose...

As enhancements are made to the programmability story of a core product like Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Visual Studio, etc., there is a fundamental question: should enhancements be made via the OM or should they be made via an XML schema? The same...

Truth be told, I have never used the Bookmarks feature in Visual Studio 2002 or 2003 or a lot of other IDE features for that matter. I always thought it was pretty weak. Besides, I just want to start laying down lines of code. On the VS Edit menu is the...

I normally go only tech in my blog with the exception of my rock thought of the day. But, the thread going on Scoble's blog today requires a temporary exception. Robert came out in defense of another blogger who was excoriated by some cowards because...