John R. Durant's WebLog

Yesterday, I mentioned the My.Blogs Outlook add-in sample and the accompanying article. Today I mention another add-in created with VSTO 2005: Creating an Outlook Task Add-in Solution with Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office . This sample was created...

I am so behind on a couple of things- I'm a few days behind on a chapter for my book. I should have it wrapped by Saturday. I'm a day behind on an article for MSDN Magazine. I should have it wrapped today. I feel like crud, and I have loads to do at work...

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=a4bb5378-7253-4212-b419-28ea6f3afdea&DisplayLang=en I am in San Francisco right now for the VS 2005, BizTalk 2005, and SQL Server 2005 Launch. Because I always do a Rock Thought for the Day...

Microsoft announces Windows Live and Office Live. These point the way Microsoft is going in the future, but the technology is live RIGHT NOW....

Call it midichlorians and a mini-convergence of the force. I don't care. But, the fact is that I experience fun coincidences all of the time. Wrox Press steamroller and publishing friend, Jim Minatel , had posted a comment to my blog. Meanwhile, I had...

I was pretty pumped when we introduced Generics with the new version of the .NET Framework ( http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms172192 ). But, I have to say that I am more excited about what we are doing with LINQ . This new initative solves a...

I have had a hectic couple of weeks trying to catch up after my surgery. Thanks for you patience with my infrequent posts during that time. But, I am back on my feet, and the posts will start to flow anew. I have appreciated the comments and direct emails...

It is common for companies to have loads and loads of documents stored up. It is equally common for documents to contain hyperlinks. But, as we all know, hyperlinks change about as quickly as Courtney Hole's excuses for drug possession. So, you end up...

I have been working on a solution that includes the auto-generation of Word documents using XML , and the resulting documents include a watermark . Inserting watermarks for end-users is as easy as it probably will ever be in Word 2003. All they need to...

As the many readers of my blog know, I'm all about blogs (thanks to Scoble and Chris Kunicki for getting me started with my blog two years ago). Blog-enabling Office applications is a no-brainer in a lot of situations. But, it has not always been easy...

One of the requests that comes around every now and again is this: Can you make it so that when a user prints a doc from Word, embedded controls don't print? The answer is "Yes".... IF the controls are floating rather than inline. For example, if you...

I am working on a cool Outlook add-in, and it involves knowing if the Outlook Reading Pane is displayed or not and what its size is. This is an extra little challenge because the Outlook OM does not expose any info about the pane. One might guess that...

While answering some posts in the NG's, I found one by Jay Harlow, Outlook MVP. He mentioned how pleased he was with our add-in support in VSTO 2005. That is pure goodness. Anyway, in our exchange, he mentioned that he has two good VSTO Outlook samples...

Have you ever written great code for a Word template and then wished you had it in another template as well? It's not as hard as it may seem to move your code from one template to another. You could use good 'ol copy/paste and re-create the entire thing...

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about VBA migration . My main contention was that migration has a lot more to do with re-thinking how the solution is put together than just changing language syntax. The .NET Framework and the advantages of VSTO 2005 should...

We just wouldn't be Microsoft if we weren't already thinking about the version after the version after the version we haven't yet released. Most of it is kept Top Secret not just to protect our IP, but also in the best interest of our customers. Well...

Document Protection in Word's XML file format: it's not the kind of thing that inspires poets, but it's great stuff nonetheless. On a recent discussion alias within Microsoft, a project manager asked how to make a document unalterable, except for certain...

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...