Friends, this is my last post. I've enjoyed being a part of the Office developer community for the past 4 years and meeting everyone over the past 10 years from the Microsoft side of the fence. My next part of the journey will be from the other side of...

Back when we were working heavily on the OpenXML file format developer tools, many of us were using zip and Notepad to edit the OpenXML files. Tom Underhill from the Office graphics team made all our lives easier with a VS package for editing OpenXML...

Gary Depue from Summit Software presented a webcast last Wednesday on How to Integrate VSTA 2.0 . I'm still getting up to speed here in the new team, so I missed it, but I'll be sure to go back and watch in the next couple of days. It's tough being...

There's been some discussion on this thread on Slashdot, ( updated ) which started from this article in The Register UK . To be clear, Microsoft is not replacing VBA with VSTA or VSTO in Office for Windows . (though VSTA and VSTO are still important...

Change. It's really the only constant here at MS. I've made a change. I'm no longer working in the Office Team, I've moved on to the Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA) team. Anyone who has met me professionally knows that I'm a big fan of...

I just got a mail from Chris Bryant (formerly Access Dev, now Marketeer) announcing the 2008 Office Dev Con. I spoke at the last Office Dev Con, along with Brian Jones, Chad Rothschiller, and Tristan Davis on OpenXML Development. I can't yet promise I...

Charles Torre sat down with Art Leonard , Brian Jones , Doug Mahugh and me to discuss Open XML  on Channel9 .  It's a two part session, Part1 is here . Brian and Doug did most of the talking and focused broadly on the background around the file format...

I've been quiet on the blog these past few months. I've been juggling work, a new baby (and a toddler) and some remodel plans, so extra-curricular activities like blogging have taken a back seat. But today at TechEd 2007, we released a Community Technology...

Doug has posted some pictures of a meetup we had last week with the OpenXML developers group: http://www.mahugh.com/images/blog/2007/03/15/openxmldevelopers.jpg That's me, in the back, to the left of Brian Jones (The) trying to be seen over some...

I just got an email from Erika that read "I have a surprise for you!" and included a link to her latest blog post . Seems Ken Getz (who wrote the code snippets ) repurposed 5 of the snippets into a couple of Visual walkthroughs with code. Ken's a great...

I recorded a screencast for Channel9 last week in which I walk you through a few of the code snippets we shipped for working with Office Open XML files using .NET 3.0. I take you through three snippets: 1. How to find the officeDocument part, or "start...

I mentioned that we were expecting a baby girl anytime. Well, Molly Ryan Boske arrived Thrusday morning. mother and baby are fine. She weighed in at a whopping 10lbs 1oz, which reminds me of the They Might Be Giants Song, She's Actual Size . Microsoft...

We've released the final version of the code snippets I told you about back in June . These are the same snippets, updated with the final schemas and namespaces that we used in the shipping version of 2007 Office System. There are 40 scenarios that enable...

Okay, I've been out for a couple of days, taking some time after shipping Office 2007 and getting ready for another product delivery (our second child, a girl, due anytime ). While I was busy getting baby stuff out of storage, the rest of the company...

We signed off on the final build of Office 2007! http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/nov06/11-062007OfficeRTMPR.mspx

Matt Scott, of the Word Team, has a great post on The Microsoft Office Word Team's Blog : Programmatically opening & saving the new default file formats in previous versions of Office . He's posted a piece of code to make it easier for you to save...

Vijayeta Tilak has been posting a lot of info lately on the OpenXMLDeveloper site and posted this about ActiveX in OpenXML . Its a good post, but there's a bit more to the story, and I've been meaning to post the details on ActiveX control support...

Looks like Dennis of Daily Dose of Excel is off to a good start on a series describing how to build a managed COM add-in for Excel using VB.NET .

As developers writing code for Office, we all need to be aware of security. Let's face it, we've had a mixed experience so far. Virus writers took advantage of the simplicity and ubiquity of VBA in Office. As a result we added a security model which can...

All of the videos for the breakout sessions from the 2006 Office Developer Conference are uploaded on MSDN . You can see Bill's keynote , then check out some sessions on the Open XML File Format: FF301—New Office XML File Formats - Presenter: Brian...

Erika has a great resource for XML in Office . She's got lots of links to blogs on XML in Office and other Microsoft Technologies, Channel9 videos (including yours truly with Brian Jones, Mauricio Ordonez and Doug Mahugh). Its kinda like a convience store...

Dave Gainer (GPM of Excel) asked me to guest-write a post on his blog . Stay tuned here, I'll be posting more about general Office Programmability.

One of the great things I love about working for Microsoft is our charitable giving program. Microsoft will match any charitable donation I make dollar for dollar (I think there is a cap on this). We even now have a policy to match time spent working...

Yesterday our folks at Office Online released the first set of the Open XML Code Snippets to the web. These snippets work with Visual Studio.NET 2005 and are written in C# and VB.NET using the WinFX (oops) .NET 3.0 System.IO.Packaging API. When we...

Well, it's raining anyway (pouring buckets here in Redmond). Which is fine weather to stay indoors and install all this fun stuff on my TabletPC. :) Here's all your details on the Betas and where to get them. 2007 Office System: http://www.microsoft...