Patrick Smith: Microsoft InfoPath

Out with the old, in with the new

2007-01-04T02:52:00Z

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 and beginning focus on InfoPath. At first, this may be a place where I begin to write about all of the new things I'm learning about this product...and believe me, the learning curve is steep. I'll most likely not assume that the reader has alot of knowledge about InfoPath...sort of a reset in knowledge and hopefully informative along the way.

Patrick

Great new developer content in VBA help

2006-10-24T04:22:00Z

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 it to do the following.

From the application (i.e. Excel), go to VBA (Alt - F11)
In VBA, go to Help / Microsoft Visual Basic Help
Choose What's New and then you'll see some topics entitled "Object Model changes since Microsoft Office <version>."

Brand new Developer Contest for Office 2007

2006-07-07T22:33:00Z

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

Patrick

Pain Points of Programmability

2006-06-30T19:52:00Z

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 know that I may not really realize what I'm asking for or getting myself into. I can't commit to fixing all of them or even responding to the comments for this post. I'm just trying to enumerate.

One of the main pain points I already know about are optional arguments in C#, so there's no real need to post that one.

Others?

thanks,
Patrick

Vista Frosting and how Office apps will respond (or not)

2006-06-30T19:40:00Z

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 his post at

http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/default.aspx

VBA and Office Availability

2006-03-25T01:54:00Z

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 is committing to ship and support VBA in office for the next 2 versions. That is the 2007 Office System and then the next version beyond that. In addition, the support policy is that when we release software, it's supported for 10 years after release.

What does this mean to you? VBA is not dead and we are committed to ensuring that the existing investment you have in VBA is realized and supported.

Hope this clears things up,

Patrick

Why Use a PIA rather than just an IA

2005-04-20T21:00:00Z

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

Office 2003 PIA Redistributable is available

2005-04-20T01:07:00Z

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 run, will extract the included files onto your drive. The files included are

O2003PIA.msi
o2003PIA_EULA.txt
o2003PIA_ReadMe.rtf

Basically, to install the package, you can execute the MSI according the instructions in the ReadMe. If you are planning to redistribute this MSI as a part of your Office solution, then you will need to include this msi along with your setup project, whether by custom action in a Visual Studio setup project or by including it (chaining) within a non-Microsoft setup builder.

Important Issues to keep in mind:

This MSI is designed to contain all of the PIA's which shipped with Microsoft Office System 2003. The product PIA's will only install if the parent product is installed on the machine.

Leave the PIA redistributable on the machine once it's installed. Because this product is redistributable, many add-ins could ship it. The MSI will only install once and then subsequent installs would just see that it's already on the machine. Removing it via Setup logic will remove it for everyone. The current recommendation is to leave uninstallation of the PIA Redistributable to the end user through Add/Remove Programs.

Office System 2003 and VBA Code Security

2005-03-03T20:15:00Z

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 instance, if someone sends you a Word document in e-mail that contains a macro, when you open the document, a trust decision must be made on whether to trust the macros contained in the document. You can see what security setting you are running in by clicking on Tools/Macro/Security within your office application. The descriptions in the dialog explain further, but for those of you not looking realtime, I'll summarize here:

If you are running in Very High mode, the code in your document will not run unless you save the document into a trusted location. High mode will force the macros to be digitally signed in order to be enabled. Medium mode will give you a choice when opening the file as to whether you want to enable the macros. If the macros are digitally signed, you'll see this information in the dialog. Low mode basically means that no check is made and macros will load and run automatically.

The bottom line? Low mode means that you have no protection against an incoming macro virus. You should at least run in Medium mode so that when you open a document containing code, the code signature can be checked and if it's borken, you'll have a dialog loaded where you can make a decision on whether to allow that code to be opened.

A good article that explains further about the security options is at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/stagsdk/html/stconSecurityMatrix_HV01082171.asp. While this article title deals with SmartTags, the information in the article lays out a nice table of the security options and what they mean.

Next up? Self Cert options