Wow, I've been out of communication for a while and I apologize for that. I was on the road again after the Las Vegas and Munich trip to go to Las Vegas again (for DevConnections) and then to San Francisco (for Oracle OpenWorld). The conferences offered some great insight into what companies are trying to do in terms of Office development. However, I'll come back to this in future posts; first, let's talk about my thoughts on sessions for the client track as I've had a few mails from people on this. (The caveat is that we're not quite done solidifying the sessions, but we're almost there - so there may be some changes looking forward.)
Over the past week, I've been trying to trim down the ODC client list. To help me, I created four main themes, under which I've been slotting specific sessions that address different technologies in an attempt to get good coverage across topical technologies and Office products. The themes I want to address are: Office Business Applications (OBA), Building a Smart Client, Hands-on Coding, and Customer Feedback. I've pretty much baked the first three, but am still thinking about that last one. The technologies I've currently got on my list (in terms of integrating with Offce solutions or using to build Office solutions) range from VS 2008/VSTO 3.0, MOSS, UC, WPF, WCF, WF, LOB System Integration, OpenXML, ClickOnce deployment, and more. I will also be providing developers with a conference road-map - i.e. a map that will recommend how they might best spend their time at the event to build certain skills and target specific development goals. The sessions will also touch upon many different core Office products, such as Outlook, Word, Excel, MOSS, Visio, and Groove.
While not a complete list, here are a few sessions I've got on my current list under the aforementioned themes:
Developing Custom Office Business Applications: From the Client to SharePoint and Beyond
Integrating WPF & WCF into Your Office Business Applications
Developing Document Centric Solutions using Open XML and VSTO 3.0
Turning Outlook into a Front-End for Third Party Systems
Some great speakers that I'd like to highlight that will be speaking in the client track are Tim Huckaby, John Holliday, John Durant, Juergen Daiberl, and Marc Hoppers. I will be posting more as I finalize the actual sessions - very likely in the next few days.
In the meantime, make sure you get the early-bird offer and register for ODC. You can find more information here:
https://microsoft.crgevents.com/ODC2008/Content/default.aspx?p=E7KTGB
Talk with you all soon!
Steve