NOTE: I am sorry that I couldn't update my blog for a few days. I still have proxy issues that prevent me from updating it while at work (even when bypassing the proxy and using the bland IP).
All of the reponses to my post on the task pane a few days ago were pretty thoughtful (except for the dumb attempts by some to post feedback with nothing but ads for gambling sites). Stephen Bullen, Excel VBA genius and team author of the Excel 2003 VBA Programmer's Reference (and nice guy all around),
made some very important remarks which I re-paste here to catch others up on the thread:
Hi John,
Yes, the Task Pane can be a useful area of the screen to use for UI, but why isn't it possible for us to use it for application-level customization? Why can't I create my own top-level task panes? Why can't I tell the host to show my VBA Userforms as Task Panes (e.g. Form1.Show vbModal/vbModeless/vbTaskPane)? Why is it that 99.9% of the articles on the site are about making use of .Net in (at least) six different ways (Smart Docs, Smart Tags, Research Services, IBF, VSTO) to get information *to* Excel/Word, rather than using it *within* Excel/Word once it's there? Is that where the natural boundary between VBA and .NET lies? .NET is best for getting information there, but VBA is best for manipulating it (through the OM) once there?
It's the Application-level piece and the one-way data flow comments that I find so important here. It is true that many of the customizations we are seeing for Word and Excel are document-specific. VSTO is clearly a doc-level approach. Smart docs is doc-level as are smart tags and Research services. COM Add-ins, as rickety as they are, are attractive because of the application-oriented approach they make possible.
And, we have not done a good enough job telling three stories:
1) Using Office as a data (or XML) producer
2) Using customizations to manipulate data and documents once they are in the authoring environment
3) When VBA or .NET is best (or is this a false dilemma?)
That said, some of the killer VSTO demos do respond to #2 (the stock allocation demo I showed at the Office developer conference is a fine example). In other words, once the data are in the spreadsheet, we interact with the task pane to re-cast the data, provide different views and so on. This is one of the great strengths of VSTO: separation of presentation from data (views from data).
Rock Thought for the Day: One of the best albums of the 70's still holds up today: They Only Come Out at Night by Edgar Winter, brother of Johnny Winter. Those of you who read my blog regularly know that I have an affinity for the prog rock era of the 70's. I remember when this album was getting airplay in the early 70's while riding around in my uncle Richard's black '69 Pontiac. The smell of the slowly broiling vinyl interior of the car is still fresh in my mind as we drove around town. Richard's life (infantry in 'Nam and so much more) is much more interesting than most of the movies one can see. I often wonder if this is true of all of us.
