OBA - Are We There Yet?
I am a beliver in the power of Office as the pre-eminant smart client for the majority of LOB applicaitons. However, I also think that we're still a little ways off from realizing my belief - not because of some entrenched NIH complex held to by consultants (though there is some of that (NOTE: because I was a consultant for at least half of my career, I take the liberty of making such broad generalizations in good fun <g>)). - but because in general, both the tooling and the guidance for building business apps based on Office as a platform has been somewhere between sketchy and non-existant.
Office 2007 brought us closer with the adoption of the OpenXML document formats - and with the forthcoming VSTO enhancements, like click once support for customizations, we take another step. Also, today I stumbled upon this piece of guidance for developers - I'm not sure that it's necessarily guidance, but it certainly at least lays out the different options (and it just looks cool).
So while we're not yet past having to deal with COM and all of its associated headaches, we can at least have a pretty WPF applet to play with.
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About hdierking
I am currently the Editor-in-Chief for MSDN Magazine. I joined Microsoft in 2006 as a product planner with the certification team at Microsoft Learning. Prior to that, I spent my career as a developer and later as an architect. My main technology passions include pretty much anything on language theory, agile development, and service-oriented architecture.
