Chris's unofficial Office Live developer blog : AJAX/Web 2.0

Flash charts for Office Live business applications

cbeiter — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 20:48:00 GMT

Charting is one area that we've wanted to see improve in Office Live. Fortunately, since enough of our platform is opened up, developers can take it upon themselves to do some charting work if they need it for their customers.

Darren Johnstone has a blog that covers the work he is doing with Office Live. He's one of our early partners in the UK. He recently posted several code samples for how to extract data from an Office Live Business App or Workspace and turn it into an SWF flash chart. This is a nice innovation on the Office Live platform. Check it out! He even packaged everything up as a download so you can try it out for yourself on your own Office Live site. This is NOT to be missed!

TalentSpring.com debuts, panacea for those hiring woes?

cbeiter — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 03:09:00 GMT

I caught up with a former coworker of mine who left Microsoft to do a startup last fall. His company, TalentSpring.com has finally come out of "stealth mode" where their patent applications are filed and they start doing the PR announcements.

If you haven't heard of them yet, TalentSpring are another one of the class of web 2.0 that are, to a degree, crowdsourcing the work of rating resumes and recruiting. Here's the recent announcement on their blog. As a job candidate, when you upload your resume, it asks you to rate a few related resumes. The expected outcome is that the best resumes for even niche industry will be much easier to find, based on the ratings of other experts in the area. Recruiters would subscribe to this service, similar to other HR sites, however they would get hopefully much more qualified set of resumes to skim over instead of the avalanche of unqualified candidates that seems to be typical with most job openings.

This is a pretty fascinating proposition, and also potentially very time-saving and lucrative. The current recruitment web sites don't seem to have very rich algorithms for searching, sorting or rating resumes. TalentSpring certainly does, which gives it a huge advantage. The strength of the service is also the weakness. It does count on the ratings of the crowd, and that means you may be be susceptible to some scams and even worse, without a crowd, there's no ratings.

Anyway, just putting in a plug here for Brian. Submit your resume and see what you think.

Learn how to develop solutions for Office Live

cbeiter — Fri, 25 May 2007 01:33:00 GMT

Our platform team has a couple training sessions coming up in the next few weeks that some of you may be interested in participating in. Don Campbell posted more information on his blog, but the short version is that we have 2 sessions, one in Boston June 5th and the other in Silicon Valley on June 11th.

Don and Rohit put these sessions together, and I had a chance to see some of the curriculum. It looks pretty interesting, so if you are in either area, you should definitely consider checking it out. If you were able to make it to Mix 07, Rohit is the guy who presented an end-to-end solution that he developed with Office Live.

Perhaps even more interesting, there are some pretty cool prizes for participating and registering solutions in the Office Live Marketplace. Can you say Office 2007 Professional? Zune? Check out Don's blog for the details! And I think the price is right too, something like "free"?

Office Live Business Contact Manager + Zillow.com mashup sample

cbeiter — Wed, 16 May 2007 23:00:00 GMT

A pretty cool mashup courtesy of our devs Katy and Albert (who you may be familiar with from his screencast videos). There is a complete writeup coming soon on the Office Live team blog, but since the sample is already posted, I wanted to get the word out to my blog subscribers also. UPDATE: Here's a link to the formal write up on the team blog.

Short version, the tool passes the addresses of contacts from your Office Live Business Contact Manager to Zillow.com's API Network and displays property estimates (aka Zestimates), charts, maps, comparables, etc. for the contact you select.

It's a very simple scenario, but the underlying concept of having a Contact Management store in the cloud accessible from any computer with an internet connection and that can integrate easily with other services for value added scenarios, that's pretty cool. OK, I am a geek.

Thanks David and Mark at Zillow for your help.

New Web Services for Office Live?

cbeiter — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 01:39:00 GMT

We've heard before that there are some gaps in the web services that are offered as part of Office Live. For the most part, we allow you to use many of the web services from Windows SharePoint Services v3 on which our business applications & workspaces are built. However, we had to block some of these, and some may be more difficult to use than you would like. We've also recently introduced our first major Office Live-specific web service to help you work with our authentication system, Windows Live ID.

We are evaluating if there are any major gaps that we can patch up to make the story more complete. Here are some questions which might get help get your thoughts started:

What's missing? What new web services do you need?
What web services are blocked that you want unblocked?
What web services are too difficult to use?
Even if you don't know the web service specifically, tell us if there are scenarios where you think web services might help.

Just reply here with your comments, or use the form on my blog to contact me directly if you prefer to remain confidential.

We appreciate your help! Thanks,

Chris

Office Live Time Card Code Sample

cbeiter — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 01:22:00 GMT

Hey folks, it's been awhile since I've posted. We're busily working on some new features for the Office Live application platform for our next release. I'm writing specs, doing screenshots, use case diagrams, etc. etc. etc. Hopefully we'll get some of these features out to you soon, some will be later. If there is some burning feature request you have, please let us know!

Anyway, the point of this post is that Office Live has a new code sample available on the Microsoft Download Center. Actually, it's been available for a little bit, but I'm just now getting around to blogging about it. It's essentially a timecard system that works with our project manager business application. It's really pretty simple... just a web page that you can display on an Office Live dashboard. It lets you select a task, and then click start to clock in and stop to clock out. It stores the start and end times for that duration in a new WSS list and associates each of those durations with the task you selected. The task shows you the aggregated amount of time.

And we use the core libary of javascript functions developed in our first sample [contacts map] to talk to the WSS web services and read and write data into the tasks and timecard lists. It's really a simple little add-on for Office Live, but hopefully it illustrates some of the powerful things you can create to add on to your subscription or those of customers who hire you to enhance theirs.

You can read the official write-up about it on the Office Live team blog.

Virtual Earth Map + Office Live Contacts mashup

cbeiter — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 01:15:00 GMT

Just as we were preparing to write a blog post on our team blog about a new code sample, we got scooped by microsoft-watch.com! Joe Wilcox must have been keeping an eye on the download center and noticed the new Office Live Contact Map sample is now available.

The sample mashes up the address information of contacts in your Microsoft Office Live Business Contact Manager with the Virtual Earth map data. Office Live's Business Applications and Workspaces are built on top of Windows SharePoint Services v3. So the sample uses WSS v3 web services to get the contact data out of the Contacts list and then uses the Virtual Earth APIs to retrieve a map and allow you to put pushpins in for each of your contacts.

It's really a simple sample, but we wanted to put something out there to help get developers jump started with little value-add projects like this. Probably the most interesting piece of the sample is the javascript library that is included, olsharedlibv1.js. It contains lots of nice functions that do the work of packaging up the SOAP requests to and from the Office Live web services. So, not only is it useful for talking to the contacts list on Office Live, but pretty much any other Business Application or Workspace list in Office Live.

There is a more complete description on the Office Live team blog. Check it out!

Oh yeah, and thanks for the kind words, Joe. Hopefully the Office Live developers out there get some value out of it.

[late breaking addition] - We even made it on Lawrence Liu's recommended reading for February with the mashup sample! Lawrence, when are you going to add an Office Live tag on the SharePoint team's blog?

Screencast video of Data Sharing in Office Live

cbeiter — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 04:15:00 GMT

In the latest version of Office Live we introduced a new feature called Data Sharing. Essentially this acts as a pipeline between your public web site and web pages and your private site Business Applications on Office Live. You can use Data Sharing to either pipe data into a Bizapp list from a form on your public site or, in reverse, you can use it to pipe data from a Bizapp list back out to your web site.

I created a little screencast demo on how to create a form to collect leads from your website and integrate it into your Business Contact Manager bizapp. It's pretty cool, if a little geeky, a feature only a developer could love.

Anyway, here's the link to the video. Check it out.

Caching and crunching your JS Files on Office Live

cbeiter — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 21:40:00 GMT

Performance of a web application or page is still a huge pain point for internet users even in the day of pervasive broadband connectivity. Some information came across my desk that says increases as small as a tenth or a half a second in page load time is enough to deter customers from purchasing on some well-known commerce web sites (which shall remain nameless here).

Two common strategies to improve download perf on web pages are file caching and crunching/compression. File caching could take a few different forms such as caching pages in memory so the server doesn’t have to access the file every time or caching pages in the temporary internet files of a browser. Crunching is a shorthand term meaning removing all of the unnecessary comments, characters, whitespaces, etc. from a file before it is transmitted, thus reducing the payload and hopefully time of transmission.

Office Live has a handler that does both caching and crunching of javascript JS files hosted on our servers. But caching JS files can prevent developers from seeing their changes real-time while they are updating code. And crunching can make debugging script more difficult to read too.

There are techniques to work-around caching that many web developers are aware of, but they may not work on Office Live. Even if you hit F5 repeatedly, delete your temporary internet files, change proxies, etc. etc., you will probably still get the same JS file from the Office Live cache for at least 24 hours. Also, you (the developer) don’t have the ability to make configuration changes on our servers that might avoid caching during code authoring.

So we’ve developed a few techniques to deal with our JS file caching and crunching and want to share them with you.

Circumvent JS file caching

The easy way to avoid caching of your JS files is to rename the file extension to something different, for example JSN or JSX.

But if you are using a nice JavaScript editor like SharePoint Designer, you want to keep the advantages of intellisense, auto-complete and code coloring, so that means you need to keep the JS extension. One way to have your cake and eat it too is to dynamically change a querystring parameter being passed to the JS file each time the file is requested. This will make your JS file request unique, so you will always get a new copy of the file.

Here is a code snippet that does just that. It has a function that appends a timestamp as the value for the querystring parameter “version”. Add the includeJS() function to your page, and every time you reference a JS file, just pass in the JS file name and path to the function.

<!--

function includeJS(src)

{

document.write("<script type=\"text/javascript\" language=\"javascript\" src=\"" + src +

"?version=" + new Date().getTime() + "\"></script>");

}

-->

</script>

includeJS("js/stuff.js");

includeJS("js/goo.js");

</script>

Avoid javascript crunching

If you are trying to pop your script into a script debugger, and are finding the code hard to read due to the javascript compression that removes all of the tabs, spacing and so forth, the simplest solution is to just change the file extension of your JS file to something else like JSN or JSX. Then just change the reference in your HTM or ASPX page to refer to the new file name.

Enable caching when done & other recommendations

When you are satisfied with the changes that you have made to your script, you should definitely take advantage of the caching and crunching by changing your file extension back to JS and/or remove any code you may have used to dynamically change the querystring parameters. Your customers will be happy you did.

Also, we encourage you to version your JS files so that you can keep track of where you are with that file. This will also help ensure that the other caches out there (proxies, browser) do not hang on to copies of your old JS files. Something as simple as foo_1.js and foo_2.js should do the trick.

Office Live vNext

cbeiter — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 02:47:00 GMT

It feels like the build-up to a big holiday around here. Everyone is frantically preparing the final touches on the new version of Office Live, due out very soon. If you already have an Office Live 1.0 Beta subscription, you've probably received a notice that you will be migrated to the new version. So keep watching your inbox for the 24-hour migration notice.

Some reviews are already starting to trickle in, and it's nice to see they like the direction we are going so far.

Once the new release is publicly available, I intend to crank up my blog again with code snippets and ideas for enhancing your Office Live subscription. We've got a few under development today, including some mashups, enhanced templates, etc. I also hope to twist the arms of some co-workers to do some guest posts here with their experiences developing solutions on Office Live v1.5. Lots of stuff is in the works, but I don't want to let the cat out of the bag. So, keep your eyes on the Office Live Dev Center on MSDN for the latest and greatest, or just check back here for more.

Windows Live Gadgets SDK goodness

cbeiter — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 03:59:00 GMT

Keeping with the SDK theme I seem to be on in the last few weeks, this one just came across my desk. Windows Live Gadgets SDK has been released.

Here's a link to their blog post announcing it, right here on MSDN!

This stuff is cool. There is the cross-compatability between the Windows Vista Sidebar and Live.com. There's just the whole "Web 2.0" AJAX grooviness.

But for Office Live, what is probably the most interesting piece is this: "Make calling web services easier - this is self-explanatory."

Right now, this is just an interesting possibility. Check back sometime in the hopefully not too distant future for something more concrete.