.NET4Office : All Office and no play...

This post brought to you by the letter E

Eric Carter — Fri, 15 Oct 2004 17:52:00 GMT

On the very off topic subject of wacky things that happen to developers office's, somehow one of the developers on my team (Mohit Gupta) has acquired a shower curtain complete with pressure rod which he has mounted on his office door. To get in to his office, you have to open the shower curtain and step on in. (As an aside, have I ever mentioned how hard it is for me to use the word "office" in a sentence and not atempt to capitalize it?)

By free association, Mohit's shower curtain reminded me of the Rubber Duckie song, available here for your Friday listening enjoyment.

http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~ncosgray/duckie/bathtime.html

For those of you who didn't grow up on Sesame Street, the song is from a childrens show that has been running on public television in the United States forever: http://www.sesameworkshop.org/sesamestreet/. I like the FAQ page (http://www.sesameworkshop.org/aboutus/inside_faq.php) which answers hard questions like "Why does Elmo refer to himself in the third person". Elmo refers to himself in the third person because he can--don't mess with the Elmo: http://www.sesameworkshop.org/sesamestreet/elmosworld/

Excel Tetris!

Eric Carter — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 20:55:00 GMT

As a developer in our group said, this isn't a killer enterprise app, it's an enterprise killer app.

If you're feeling a little too productive, check out this article by Woo Seok Seo where you are shown how to create a Tetris application in Excel using Visual Studio Tools for Office 1.0. Crazy stuff :)

http://www.codeproject.com/dotnet/seoexceltetris.asp

Tips and Tricks for Office

Eric Carter — Mon, 26 Apr 2004 17:22:00 GMT

PC Magazine posts 106 tips and tricks for Office. There's so many obscure things here that I've never heard of--like holding down the shift key when picking the file menu in Word--it gives you a “Close All” command.

Someone should put together 365 tips and tricks for Office and turn it into one of those day-to-day calendars.

Who am I

Eric Carter — Wed, 07 Apr 2004 07:33:00 GMT

I just realized that I should maybe provide a little better idea of who I am and what I do.

My name is Eric Carter--I'm a Development Lead at Microsoft. My team and I are currently working on Visual Studio Tools for Office 2.0.

My team (which fortunately is staffed entirely by people with very big brains that run circles around me) has worked on the VSTO 1.0 runtime and a lot of the guts for VSTO 2.0 including the runtime and programming model design for VSTO 2.0.

While at Microsoft I also worked on VSA and the Visual Studio Macros IDE for several years--my area was the debugger. And I spent a year or so working on VBA for Office XP.

Prior to working at Microsoft I worked on a product called iGrafx FlowCharter for Micrografx (now Corel). There I mainly worked on designing and implementing a brand new object model for that product. ABC FlowCharter (the predecessor to iGrafx FlowCharter) was one of the first products outside of Microsoft to support OLE and have an object model, but over the years the organic growth that typically happens in object models had turned it into a hazardous jungle that just needed to be replanted. Also I integrated VBA into iGrafx FlowCharter while there.

So my areas of interest/expertise are object model design, application programmability, .NET, Office programmability, as well as just general programming stuff and (since I have this lead thing in my title) all the interesting areas you deal with when you're working outside of the code editor (like people and teams and schedules and politics).

I'm reminded of the scene in Anger Management where Jack Nicholson keeps repeating to Adam Sandler “but who are you?” as he tries to tell him who he is in terms of what he does. So maybe I never answered the question in my post title :)