Are you interested in learning to develop solutions for Outlook? The Outlook Developer Roadmap puts the the building blocks in clearer perspective. The Outlook Developer Roadmap is the latest in a series of Office developer roadmaps to help developers learn about available APIs and technologies supported by an Office application. Use the Outlook Developer Roadmap to explore one or more of its development technologies: Primary Interop Assembly, object model, MAPI, Auxiliary API, Outlook Social Connector provider extensibility, and Office Mobile Service.

Interested in seeing the available APIs for Excel or Visio? Visit the Excel Developer Roadmap and Visio Developer Roadmap as well!

Just wanted to provide a quick summary of content published on MSDN for Office client applications in April, 2011:

Developers and power users new to programming with the Excel object model take note: there is a new series of videos that show how to create, edit, and run macros in Excel 2010: Save time by creating and running macros in Excel 2010!

This set of 4 videos ranges in length from 3 to 5 minutes each. For our purpose of learning an object model, I'd like to call out the first two videos in the set: the first video in the series shows how to record a macro that fills a series of cells in a workbook. The second video shows how to view and edit the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code for the recorded macro in the Visual Basic editor. In general, for Office client applications that support macro recording (Excel, Visio, Word), using the Visual Basic editor to look at the code of a recorded macro is a convenient way to learn the application's object model, and how to write the code for a task that maps to a series of actions in the application's user interface. You can use the code for the recorded macro as a baseline, and extend its functionality by writing further code to achieve your purpose.  Recently I used a similar approach to learn how to use the Word object model to search for a string in an email message. I tried recording a Word macro of searching for a string in a Word document. Then I adapted the code and wrote the macro for the blog post  How to Search for a String in an Outlook Email Message and Automate a Reply that Contains the String.

If you are new to programming with the Excel object model, or even Visio or Word, do take a look at the training videos and consider approaching the object models through recorded macros!

In addition to delivering developer-oriented content for the Office client applications such as Access, Excel, Outlook, Word, and Visio, the Office Client Developer Content team is also responsible for providing documentation on SharePoint Server service applications, such as Excel Services and Word Automation Services.

Recently, we’ve published 3 Visual How To videos (with associated articles) that showcase how to create interactive solutions around Excel Services in SharePoint Server 2010. In addition to the videos, we’ve also made a superb book excerpt available that covers nearly the entire range of the Excel Services development landscape, including: client-side JavaScript; Excel Web Services; Excel REST; UDF; and Using Data Connection Libraries.

For Word Automation Services, we’ve also included a new book excerpt that is a welcome addition to the content already available in the SharePoint Server 2010 SDK.

Check it out!

Excel Services

Videos

Using the Calculation Power of Excel Using Excel Services in SharePoint Server 2010

Using the Excel Services REST API to Access Excel Data in SharePoint Server 2010

Creating an Excel Services and Bing Maps Mashup for SharePoint 2010 Using the Excel Services ECMAScript Object Model

Book Excerpt

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Web Applications: The Complete Reference - Chapter 12: Excel Services

Word Automation Services

Book Excerpt

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Web Applications: The Complete Reference - Chapter 10: Word Automation Services

The time reporting macro that I blogged about a few months ago has been implemented as a C# Outlook 2010 add-in. The add-in's Visual Studio project is now available for download as part of the Visual How To Creating a Simple Time-Reporting Tool Based on the Outlook 2010 Calendar. This add-in has significant improvements in the input interface, and based on your input parameters, generates a time report file in Comma-Separated Values (csv) format.

This add-in uses the same principles as the earlier macro to track time you spend on tasks -

• You create an appointment in the Outlook default calendar to identify the time you spend on a task.
• You assign one or more categories to an appointment to qualify the task. (Note: if you multitask during a period of time, it is fine to assign multiple categories for that appointment. Do not, instead, create appointments that have one category each and overlap them with one another.)

For example:

1. You can set up the two Outlook categories "Check email" and "Customer visit".
2. You create a recurring appointment for 9-10am every morning, as this is the time you regularly spend on reading and responding to email.
3. You assign that recurring appointment the category "Check email".
4. Suppose you visited a customer today from 11-5pm. You then create an appointment for that period and assign it the "Customer visit" category.
5. At the end of today, you can start the add-in, specify today's date as the time range to report on, select the categories that you'd like to report on, and generate the time-tracking report.

This add-in has significant improvements in the following areas:

A user-friendly interface allows you to select a date range and categories you'd like to report on, and whether you'd like a summary or detailed report

A dialog box for you to specify the location and time report file.

A resultant time report file in CSV format that you can conveniently view or edit in Microsoft Excel.

The accompanying article for this add-in presents considerations for further business logic. Download the code, build the add-in in Visual Studio, and try it to help track your time!