The background on apps for Office and SharePoint

re: The background on apps for Office and SharePoint

Fırat Esmer — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 12:42:23 GMT

Thanks!

re: The background on apps for Office and SharePoint

Dan — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 23:48:31 GMT

will NAPA allow writing apps in vb.net, or is it c sharp only?

re: The background on apps for Office and SharePoint

I'm Brian Jones — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 19:36:30 GMT

Stephane,

It's good to be back blogging again :-)

-Brian

re: The background on apps for Office and SharePoint

I'm Brian Jones — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 19:35:43 GMT

Hi Pierpaolo,

We've done a lot of work over the years with the VSTO team to allow folks to write managed solutions against Office. We made the decision with those solutions to have the code live separate from the document. The document can reference the code, but for governance and lifecycle management purposes we have code live separately. I definitely understand why you're making the request though, as VBA embedding in documents is obviously a super convenient way of distributing a solution.

With the new apps for Office work, we've gone for the best of both worlds. The "code" is just a webpage and can be hosted anywhere. There is a huge set of developers out there whose primary languages for client side extensibility are HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and we wanted to make sure they had the ability to build apps for Office. Obviously on the server side, you have complete flexibility (.net; php; etc.). When you insert an app into a document, the document references a manifest file that lives in the Office.com store, or your own internal app catalog. This way the document can have the apps "inserted", and when they are opened on another machine, Office will look-up the manifest file and then load the HTML from the website specified in the manifest. This makes it super easy to share documents with apps, but also provides a robust way to manage the lifecycle of the apps, as everything must go through the catalog you've set up.

-Brian

re: The background on apps for Office and SharePoint

Pierpaolo — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 22:36:00 GMT

Hi,

I am wondering why you have not yet implemented a VB.NET/ C# document-level extension like vba has been for years. Something that you can just write in code behind he doc and move with it.

Everything seems ready for the two language to be integrated fully: optional parameters, named parameters, code editing during excecution.

Is there any chance we can get them to be the two new macro languages for office?

If yes \ no why?

Thanks

Pierpaolo

re: The background on apps for Office and SharePoint

Stephane Rodriguez — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 20:52:54 GMT

5 years in hibernation. Holy caca, he's back!

re: The background on apps for Office and SharePoint

I'm Brian Jones — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 16:08:02 GMT

Hey Ian, good to hear from you. Hope all is well. :-)

It's been a few years since I last blogged on the Open XML front. On the personal side, we have an amazing 2 year old daughter, and we now have a son on the way this fall. Work wise, I started the OSF team a little over two years ago, and have been working on crafting this new application model.

Open XML is still one of my babies of course, so I stay involved there as well. With the new cloud based application model, file format transparency & manipulation is definitely an important piece.

-Brian

re: The background on apps for Office and SharePoint

Ian Easson — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 06:17:56 GMT

Hi Brian.

Haven't heard from you in a long while since the whole OOXML thing.

What have you been up to?