Along with the dawn of a new year, I am beginning a new position at Microsoft. I have joined the InfoPath team to be a program manager there. Since this change is taking place, I'll be changing the focus of this blog from general office programmability...

One of the great new additions to the help content for Office 2007 is the addition of Object Model diff topics where we've compared the object model for each Office product from 2000, XP, 2003, and the new 2007. The easiest way to see these topics...

I just found out about a new contest open to Office Developers. You can check out the information at http://www.developwithoutborders.com . Patrick

Say that 3 times real fast. No wait, don't. I'm interested in your top pain point for writing code against the Office suite of applications. Why? Because I'm doing some research to understand more of the issues that you face as developers. Now I...

David Gainer just posted about a change in behavior with Office programmability on Windows Vista. It's a new behavior called frosting where the window goes to a less bright version of it's original self when it stops responding to messages. Check out...

After hearing from and talking to you during the Office Developer Conference this week, I realize that there is some misinformation or at least a misunderstanding about the future of VBA in office, so I wanted to clear this up. Specifically, Microsoft...

Many wonder why use the PIA or why an IA isn't "just as good of a solution". Art Leonard wrote some about this in his blog about the PIA Redist. Check it out. http://blogs.msdn.com/artleo Later, Patrick

The Office 2003 PIA Redistributable package is available for download. Located at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=3c9a983a-ac14-4125-8ba0-d36d67e0f4ad&displaylang=en , the O2003PIA.exe is an IExpress package which, when...

I know this may be a basic topic for many, but always one worth bringing up. Macro code security in Microsoft Office System 2003 gives you the ability to identify documents with VBA code and make better decisions around whether to trust that code. For...