Donovan Lange's Work-Blog : OneNote

Today is "We Love AJ Day!"

DoLange — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 19:42:00 GMT

February isn't just about President's Day and Valentine's Day. Move over, there's a new holiday in town.

Check out AJ's latest expose in five parts: An In Depth Look at the OneNoteImporter Managed Assembly (II, III, IV, and V), where he goes undercover to reveal all the dirt on how the OneNoteImporter classes really work. Admire the words (oh, the nouns, the adjectives!) but also be sure to ogle the pretty pictures as well.

So make today the best "We Love AJ Day!" ever and go show him some love.

Speaking of hot:

DoLange — Fri, 20 Aug 2004 17:50:00 GMT

Darron Devlin just released two new PowerToys: a OneNote Image Writer (a virtual printer driver that can be used to print any document directly to your OneNote notebook) and WebPageToOneNote (adds a button to your IE toolbar that captures an image of the current webpage into your notebook).

Go. Click. Now.

Get it while it's hot!

DoLange — Wed, 28 Jul 2004 06:09:00 GMT

Unless you took the day off yesterday, you probably heard that there's a new service pack in town. What with all that goodness included, you'd best be installing. And quick, too. You won't want to miss this.

The first two PowerToys for OneNote SP1 are now available for general download.

That's right. Walk -- don't run -- to the nearest Office Download Center and you too can be the very proud owner of some cute purple powertoys. Introducing Send to OneNote from Internet Explorer and Send to OneNote from Outlook. Even MSN agrees: purple is in this fall.

(Oh, and don't let the about dialogs fool you. David and Omar did all the heavy lifting on these. They rock.)

Caution: addictive material! Handle with care.

DoLange — Fri, 18 Jun 2004 08:06:00 GMT

It was more difficult than we expected. Our fingers are exhausted, and we won't even talk about the truly frightening quantities of Mt. Dew that were consumed. The end result: a shiny pile of ones and zeros we think you'll want to meet.

Previously I hinted that Omar, David and myself have been collaborating on a nicely abstracted managed assembly that provides an object model for importing data into OneNote. But as of today, it lives!

So what does it do, you ask? Enough talk:

using Microsoft.Office.OneNote; 
namespace Example 
{ 
   class TrivialImport 
   { 
      public static void Main() 
      { 
         // Create a new page in the section "General", with the  
         // title "Import Example".  
         Page p = new Page("General.one", "Import Example"); 
 
         // Create a new Outline, and add some content to it: 
         OutlineObject outline = new OutlineObject(); 
         outline.AddContent(new HtmlContent("Hello <i>world</i>!")); 

 
         // Add the outline to our page: 
         p.AddObject(outline); 

 
         // Commit the changes to OneNote, and set the actively viewed page: 
         p.Commit(); 
         p.NavigateTo(); 
      } 
   } 
}

Try it out for yourself: the assembly, source code, documentation, and class diagrams are all available for download here.

(Note that this is a work in progress, and as a result you may encounter the occasional bug or two. So if it eats your homework, erases all of your Tivo'd episodes of Friends, or breaks up with your girlfriend -- you have been warned. Of course, if this does occur, let me know.)

Go wild; but be careful: once you start importing, it's hard to stop.

[3/22/06: Updated URLs to point to new site.]

Mixed Metaphors

DoLange — Fri, 30 Apr 2004 00:05:00 GMT

I've been meaning to talk about some of the design decisions regarding OneNote DataImport for a while now...

If OneNote was a house, you could think of our SP1 as the ultimate in remodelling. Trading Spaces on crack: new hardwood floors, reupholstered furniture, a bit of paint, and let's not forget the nice new kitchet cabinets. It's pretty fancy. Yet at the same time, it's still the same basic foundation and house. Sure, we may have added a couple new windows, an extra bedroom and a patio, but we didn't knock down any load bearing structures or add a new basement.

(And it turns out that you actually need building permits for serious construction work! Think about all the cases where people want to upgrade yet prefer to minimize risk or UI changes; particularly in the enterprise where user training can be prohibitively expensive. As a result, all of our new features have to be disableable upon demand. If you set the registry key HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\OneNote\EnableSP1FixesOnly to the DWORD value of 1, walls slide out of hidden recesses, the cabinets flip upside down, and Dexter's secret laboratory is safely disguised. Explosion? What explosion? I didn't hear anything.)

Partially, constraining your development to the periphery helps keeps development costs low and mitigates scheduling risk, but it's also important to remember that software also requires a significant amount of testing and stabilization work. (In general, most software schedules throughout the industry allocate roughly 1/3rd of their scheduled time to design, 1/3rd to development, and 1/3rd to testing.) Every code change has the risk of negatively interacting with other parts of the system, and the entropy will only increase with time.

Testing extensibility is particularly hard. Unlike most UI features, APIs are generally open ended systems, that can take an infinite number of inputs. This is partially mitigated by reusing existing codepaths which have already been tested. For example, importing html uses the same HtmlImport code as copy/paste, etc.

Speaking of costs, let's not forget startup. As the first release to offer any extensibility, you have to account for research, minor architecture work in the codebase, etc. It might not sound significant, but it adds up when you're working within a shortened development timeline.

Design issues such as security and maintainability are also important, and you really do have to get them right the first time. APIs have a habit of outliving most peoples expectations. They're hard to kill. So it's important to be certain that what you ship will last a long time, and won't bite you in the long run. The software landscape is littered with examples of projects that chose to implement their automation interfaces directly on top of their code internals; which certainly afforded clients with the utmost flexibility and seemed like a good idea at the time... Lastly, your APIs have to be secure from inception.

All of these constraints dictate that you can't go hog-wild. You have to choose your scenarios carefully, and refrain from excessive generalization. You need to be spend-thrifty, reusing what you can whenever possible. And you have to be a bit cautious, too.

The rest is history.

OneNote Power Toys

DoLange — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 00:01:00 GMT

Chris Pratley recently mentioned various ideas for OneNote Power Toys. Personally, I'd really like to see:

A Journal Importer that cracks open journal files, creates a new page (in a user specified section) in the OneNote Notebook, and then imports all of the ink content from the journal file into the newly created page.
A generic Print to OneNote driver that appears in every sense to be a regular system printer but converts the “printed“ input into an image that is subsequently imported -- perhaps as a background image -- in the user's notebook.

It's unfortunate that the hardest part about all of the Power Toys I've heard mentioned isn't the actual import of the final content into OneNote -- it's generally interfacing with the external application: Outlook, Internet Explorer, or Windows for the Print Driver, etc.

Nonetheless, we've been working on ways to make it easier to use and develop OneNote power toys. David on our PM team has been working recently on a single page of add-in's that will be available off of the Office site that will provide links to all the various power toys that you can install with the SP. (For example, I suspect you'll be seeing Omar's excellent Outlook2OneNote add-there. :) And I've been working on a nicely abstracted managed interface to our COM components that feels more like an Object Model. (It's not quite ready for release, but if you're anxious to try it out -- drop me an email, and I'll send you the source.)

It's great to see people thinking about OneNote PowerToys -- one of the best moments in the life of any developer is seeing people use your programs in ways you'd never have imagined.

Ask and ye shall receive

DoLange — Thu, 22 Apr 2004 17:51:00 GMT

AJ has been working busily on the documentation of the OneNote DataImport APIs. This morning, he posted an early draft to his blog. (Introduction here, as well as our complete XML schema.) Hats off to Andrew for his incredible work on this! Go show him some love. :)

I'll try and post some more complicated DataImport examples here in the near future, and I'd also like to talk about some of the design decisions that we went through, various tips & tricks, etc; but until then -- what questions do you have?

Bigger than a breadbox?

DoLange — Wed, 21 Apr 2004 19:32:00 GMT

Since posting our SP1 Preview to the web, we've gotten a lot of requests for documentation on our new DataImport APIs -- newsgroup posts, emails, blog entries, the guy standing outside of my apartment this morning -- all asking the same thing. “What is this extensibility you speak of?“, “What does it do?“, and “You have a very nice apartment”. It's a bit flattering, and we probably should have seen it coming.

At the moment, we've been working madly on the documentation that will be published to the Office Developer Center when we ship. Given the interest in this we're going to try to make an early draft of the documentation available to the beta community soon; hopefully in the next couple of days. In the meantime, here are some basic details about DataImport extensibility:

DataImport extensibility in OneNote 2003 SP1 is designed to address a very limited but commonly requested scenario. That is, getting data from other applications, such as Outlook or a CRM system, into OneNote. So you won’t see a full object model in this release. We provide a COM interface with two methods: Import and NavigateToPage. You pass an XML document to the Import method. The XML doc follows a OneNote specific XSD schema. In that XML doc you can specify sections and pages to create, as well as objects to place on those pages, such as ink, images, html, and so on.

Don't change that channel, folks.

Inaugural Post

DoLange — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 22:50:00 GMT

First, the boring stuff: Hi, I'm Donovan. I've been a developer on Microsoft Office OneNote since starting at Microsoft last June. (As the latest addition to our developer team, people just call me the new guy. That's "Mr. New Guy" to you. :) This isn't my only blog -- from time to time, I've been known to question life's little inconsistencies in a less formal setting.

It's no coincidence that today marks my first post on MSDN. If you were awake at 2am this morning, and also happened to be surfing by your favorite website, you may have been surprised to discover that Martians really do have wings. Elsewhere on the internet, however, the floodgates were opening, and the OneNote SP1 Preview was released!

[And don't be deceived by the "Service Pack" title. Like so many other things, the name can be deceptive. Don't get me wrong; we did an unholy amount of bug exterminating for sure. But it's the new features and usability tweaks that I think you're really going to enjoy.]

I'm responsible for several of the features making their debut in this release from the development side of things -- namely the new DataImport APIs, Password Protection, as well as some of the less noticeable UI tweaks such as Resizable Page Tabs, Folder Move, etc.

Now that you've had a chance to play with some of the new features… (What? You haven't installed the preview yet? *sigh* I'll wait. Ok, ready now?) I'm curious to know what you think: what do you like? Even more importantly, what do you dislike? I'm not making any promises, but input really does helps us know what we need to change. So be brutal. You won't hurt my feelings. I'm tough. After all, that's why they call me Mr. New Guy.