Eric White's Blog : News

Availability of Public Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 Betas

EricWhite — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:43:00 GMT

Today at PDC, we announced the availability of our public Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 betas. The next few months are simply going to be fun. We can finally talk about all the cool new features, and especially from my point of view, the new stuff for developers. It's a whole new world. We're making this beta available in seven languages - English, Spanish, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Russian, French and German.

Gray Knowlton has a fun post on the Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 PDC Keynote. Gave me a sense of being there. J And Erika Ehrli covered the beta release nicely as well.

Here's some links to places to get started:

Download Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta

Project 2010 Beta

Project Server 2010 Beta

SharePoint Designer 2010 Beta (32-bit)

SharePoint Designer 2010 Beta (64-bit)

SharePoint Foundation 2010 Beta

SharePoint Server 2010 Beta

Visio 2010 Beta

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

The new developer centers are live:

Office 2010 Beta Developer Center

SharePoint 2010 Beta Developer Center

Visual Studio 2010 Beta Developer Center

The Office Developer Documentation team made an announcement that is important for any developers who are getting started in 2010 development. If you want to make sure that you are viewing the most up-to-date help for the Office 2010 client applications, read about the Developer Help Updates for Office 2010 Beta.

SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 Developer Training Courses Launched on Channel 9

EricWhite — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 06:46:00 GMT

Channel 9 launched new developer training courses for SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010. I know the folks who produced this, and personally seen a lot of it. This is good stuff. The training consists of extensive recordings from top MVPs/experts on how to develop with both SharePoint and Office 2010. As a developer, I'm personally particularly enthused about three developer aspects of SharePoint 2010: Client Object Model, Sandboxed Solutions, and LINQ to SharePoint, but there's a lot more there than that. If you haven't seen what the buzz is about, check it out.

SharePoint 2010 Developer Training: SharePoint 2010 has evolved into a first-class developer platform. Visual Studio 2010 integration is fantastic.

Office 2010 Developer Training: There are a number of new features and UI extensions that you'll want to know about.

Also while I'm at it, want to let you know about Windows Server 2008 R2 training. I really appreciate W2008 R2.

New Open XML Developer Center on MSDN

EricWhite — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 02:25:00 GMT

As most developers who work with Microsoft technologies know, there are Developer Centers on MSDN. Each developer center, run by a team devoted to the technology, contains the best resources for that technology, including links to SDK downloads, documentation, whitepapers, code samples on Code Gallery and CodePlex, bloggers and their posts, forums, and more. These developer centers are great resources, and should often be the first stop in your search for a solution to your developer challenges.

I'm happy to announce that we've revamped our Open XML Developer Center. The new dev center is much better than the old one, including links to many more resources, blog posts, tools, screen-casts, visual How-To articles (articles with an accompanying screen-cast), and more. There are also some appearance changes, but most important is the list of content, assembled in one place, that can help you find what you need.

The most important feature of the new Open XML Developer Center is the navigation panel:

This is a complete list of all the pages in the Developer Center. That's it – 16 pages, so it's easy to navigate. (Some of them have a lot of material on them, so you'll need to scroll to see it all.)

Here's my quick summary of what's available:

Downloads – download the Open XML SDK, Visual Studio Code Snippets, the Ecma Standard, and find links to Microsoft's implementation notes on Ecma-376 and IS29500.
Learn Open XML – this page and and primarily the pages underneath (Getting Started, MSDN Articles, How Do I Videos, SDK, Training, Webcasts and Videos) give you what you need to get started, from very basic material to advanced topics.
Scenarios – find information based on what you're trying to do.
Technologies – find content based on whether you're working with word-processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, or Open XML in general.

I helped find the links for these pages, and I'm absolutely certain that I've missed some important ones, so please send me your links – both to your own blog posts, and to tools and products. We're happy to include links in these pages. We'll send folks your way! Use the EMAIL button on my blog, or add comments on this page. We can add links as often as every couple of weeks – this is going to be an active dev center!

While there's quite a bit here now, in the future, expect to see a lot more. Open XML is still a relatively new technology, and we know that there are places where we need to provide more examples and guidance for scenarios that we haven't addressed yet. With the release of the Open XML SDK 2.0 (which will be released in the same time frame as Office 2010), we'll be converting a lot of this content to use the SDK 2.0. We're writing new MSDN articles, CodePlex and Code Gallery samples, recording new screen-casts, and more. It's a fun time to be involved in document formats!

Special thanks to Verna Appel DeLuna, who drove this effort! Also Frank Rice and Erika Ehrli Cabral! Great job!

"Object library invalid or contains references to object definitions that could not be found" or "Element not found"

EricWhite — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 01:30:00 GMT

After installing security advisory 960715 and opening a workbook with one of Visual Basic 6 ActiveX controls embedded in the workbook you receive an error:

“Object library invalid or contains references to object definitions that could not be found” or “Element not found.”

For more information, see this post on the Visual Studio Office Developer Team’s blog. We want to get this message out to the most people possible.

Microsoft Promises No Patent Prosecution for the MONO Project

EricWhite — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 02:18:00 GMT

Peter Galli, Senior Product Manager at Microsoft, has posted that Microsoft will be applying the Community Promise to the ECMA 334 and ECMA 335 specs. In his post, he says, "It is important to note that, under the Community Promise, anyone can freely implement these specifications with their technology, code, and solutions." Very cool.