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Forget being the best thing since sliced bread – this is the best thing ever . Well maybe not quite that good, but it's still darn cool! Finally – FINALLY! – you can get decent IntelliSense for JScript inside Visual Studio ! Holy hotcakes, Batman! This is so awesome you have to download Visual Studio...

I'm cheating here by re-posting an e-mail I sent the other day... but hey, you don't expect me to come up with new content for this blog do you? :-) Here is a deliberately contrived example of why you might need to protect interfaces with inheritance demands. Say I have declared an interface...

Up until recently, I was working on a rather large spec for an as-yet-un-announced product. The majority of the spec consisted of class definitions and the details surrounding their interactions, but there was also a rather large conceptual component to the spec as well; you can't really dive into 50...

Based on some of Nicole's feedback , I decided to write a basic app that checked your .NET security settings for you -- kind of like a very basic version of the Windows XP SP2 "Security Centre" tool which pops up and annoys you if you don't have the firewall or Automatic Updates turned on. (Whilst I...

Dave asks for an example of how to use RequestRefuse and RequestOtional . Here's my attempt to post a short blog entry that describes it (luckily I had the code already at hand... ;-) ). The code consists of two libraries ("Optional" and "Refuse") and a main program for accessing them both...

Updated information about VSTO below As you may know, the .NET Framework 1.1 ("Everett") Service Pack 1 Tech Preview is available for download . You should try to install this on your non-production machines and test to make sure your existing applications continue to run. Please report any problems...

Keith Brown writes a comment in one of my older posts about a chapter in his book dealing with developing code as a non-Admin . A great read if you're still one of those people running as an Administrator because you think you need to in order to do programming. Maybe you should buy the book if he ever...

A link on Slashdot points to a rant about why one developer thinks that administrators are the scum of the earth. There are some good counter arguments on the comments page. It's interesting because we spend quite a bit of time at work trying to make sure that the products we design for developers...

I somehow (?) came across a blog where a customer wonders how VSTO tightens up security. That's an interesting story. As many of you will know, Office already has a security model for VBA and COM Add-Ins that is based on two types of evidence (digital signatures and "installed" code) and...

If you're going to the PDC in LA this year and you're interested in Office development, you should add Reza Chitsaz's session to your calendar (TLS346). He has some great content and some really cool demos showing the new stuff that will be coming out in the future. And we only just released VSTO 1.0...

As I mentioned in a previous blog , there are some pretty creative (and destructive) things people can do with your code if you're not careful. Just as a kitchen knife can be used to cut cheese or to kill someone, so your code can be used to increase productivity or wreak digital havoc. It's not all...

[Ed: I've now posted a follow up entry to this blog that talks about some strategies you can use to mitigate the kinds of problems outlined in this blog entry] <sigh> Code repurposing really blows. And it sucks. It sucks and it blows. And not necessarily in that order! This blog could be...

I wrote about a few debugging tips for VSTO the other day. Something else just came up this morning that I should add. Does this scenario sound familiar? You decide to create a new VS project You click through all the default dialogs, ignoring the silly default name (you'll change it later)...

VSTO has been picked by a few more places; you can pick your favourite link from Google News results or just go straight to the Australian version :-) Now if this would somehow make it to Slashdot , I could retire happy. I would have written an entry last night had my laptop keyboard not died on...

It seems that everyone I know who is writing a blog has a long list of things they want to talk about, and the list grows faster than they can write entries. This is fundamentally different from the way newsgroup postings work, where it's very much a reactionary thing (someone posts a question and then...

The VSTO release has been picked up by SD Times . Hopefully this is the first of many stories. Unfortunately (but understandably) they don't explain the security story correctly, but that's a minor point. There's also something about Microsoft Office Solution Accelerators on PressPass. VSTO documentation...

It's Monday night. You come home from work. What do you do? Sit in the lounge and code, of course! Rob is working on "fixing" (ha) WordBlogX and actually writing a "real" setup program for it (he can't help himself, you see. It's a sickness). I'm playing around with CryptoAPI...

Spurred on by the knowledge that at least 5 people read my blog and the fact that it's 2:40 am the morning before I'm supposed to give a talk on Office security, I thought I'd post some more stuff. For those of you who didn't go to TechEd and learn all about VSTO , we have this new product called VSTO...

I've posted the WordBlogX code on www.gotdotnet.com ; just need to wait for the upload to be approved now. My roommate is now happily (well.... ;-) ) using it on his machine. He found a bug in my really dumb setup batch file for me. He's even posted an entry about how horrible my batch file is......

So I've spent soooooo long getting this stupid thing released that you're probably expecting bells and whistles out the wazoo. Well, I hate to disappoint you but really this is as bare-bones as it gets, including an amazingly stupid BAT file "setup" that is more likely to fail than not... one...

A couple of people have asked me about this... I just need to clean up a few things in my "copious spare time" and then I'll post it to GotDotNet -- I promise! Sorry for the delay :-(

My trip to Australia and New Zealand went very well -- lots of customers are interested and/or excited about Office development and the possibilities that VSTO provides for them. Nice to actually be around 3,000 people who (for the most part) actually like Microsoft after spending most days browsing...

Just a quick message to anyone who happens to be reading this that I'm still around. I've just been quite busy recently and have not had the time to really write anything profound. There's lots of stuff I'd like to write about, but it's not very clear if they're "permitted" topics. We have...