Back from PDC

Misha Shneerson — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 09:49:00 GMT

I am back from PDC and I can finally post to my blog! I was not able to do it from LA because 2 weeks before PDC I accidentally ran over my laptop with my van. No surprises here - the laptop is quite useless now. So in LA I had access to computers only at the Convention Center and there I was busy chatting with people that know our VSTO stuff pretty well or do not know anything about it or only used previous v1 version of VSTO and were totally blown away with the v2 demos. I had a chance to talk to the people I heard from before but never met face to face (Peter, Bill, Darren and many others, those who have public blogs and those who do not). Many people offered their views and gave us reasons to work on our next version. Should I really say I am grateful for this? Well, I am.

I spoke at the pre-conference where we had about 10 hours long series of sessions covering VSTO v2. I was doing two sessions: one about ActionsPane and SmartTags support and another one about VSTO security. The first session went pretty good. Even the LA power outage that caused us to delay the talk was great because we used it up entirely for the Q&A. The other one was quite difficult. I was told before that CAS related talks are the hardest ones but now I got the chance to experience it myself. I believe I started losing the audience while giving quick overview of CAS - code groups, evidences, four policy levels and intersection of permission sets are just too much to digest in 15-20 minutes of the overview. I completely lost the bravest souls when I pulled up the slide which presented the VSTO AppDomain policy level in the form you usually would see when running caspol -lg (to get this slide I actually copied code from the caspol into my VSTO assembly and modified it to only list the codegroups for the AppDomain policy level). The rational behind the slide was to show the inner workings of our security policy as opposed to presenting VSTO security as a black box with a set of rules that you have to follow. I believe the talk made good to the sales of Eric's book though and only one guy came up to me and thanked for sharing my views :)

We announced VSTA at the PDC. There were a lot of questions about how VSTO is related to VSTA. Both technologies are developed by the same team and hence are closely related. Here is the deal. VSTO roughly can be divided into 2 pieces a) a generic runtime and design time support which does not make any assumptions about what host application is and b) integration of this runtime with Word, Excel and Outlook. As a side note, due to this architecture we were able to build our Outlook support in record time - the first prototype of Outlook support was only done in March 2005. VSTA is even more improved version of VSTO's host agnostic part with additional support for managed hosts (VSTO runtime is primarily addressed at native hosts). However, this time instead of doing the integration part ourselves we will offer the ISVs to integrate VSTA into their applications. I should also say that a lot of new concepts were introduced such as contract and more generally MAF - Managed Addins Framework. BTW, for the deep architectural insights of what it takes to design extensible hosts keep an eye on TQ's blog. Tom is a light version of The Matrix's architect but he actually does make sense :)

I did get an interesting feedback about our blogs. We have a lot of bloggers but we rarely say how we are related organisationally to each other and this sometimes makes things difficult to connect. So here it goes - I do not have any reports and I report to Eric Carter. We primarily are buildng the VSTO runtime and our team is called the frameworks team. Eric reports to JackG, TQ is an architect on our team, he is freelancing here and there and also reports to Jack. Andrew Whitechapel is my and Eric's PM. Paul Stubbs is a PM working on VSTA. John Durant is also a PM driving our Outlook subsidiary. And there is a lot of other great people who not chose yet to go public.

What else? Ah, feedback. I love feedback. If you made it through the end of this post please add your comments, experiences, requests.

To sum it up - the conference was great, I am awfully tired, I missed my family and I am happy to see my kids and wife. Happy VSTOing to all of you.

VSTO PDC sessions

Misha Shneerson — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 07:26:00 GMT

PDC is just in a week and I will be there. I will present during the preconference with Eric Carter and Andrew Whitechapel. The reason three of us are doing this session is because it is 6 hours long! Since we all work directly on the VSTO code base, get ready for deep coverage and bring your toughest questions. One thing I can tell is that the VSTO preconference slide deck is very impressive and it is oriented at developers.

I also previously mentioned that Eric (who happens to be my manager) got me and some other folks to work in Office's building. We were working on integrating our early VSTO 3.0 thinking into Office12 or ... it might be the other way around :) Considering we had only 3 weeks to get something working, while keeping an eye on the last phases of shipping VSTO v2, we did a good job. Many Office sessions in the conference will show the first bits of VSTO vNext. For complete list check out this compiled guide. And do not miss the last 2 sessions in this guide.

Also, the rumor is there will be new book signing by Eric.

Have fun, I know I will.

Misha Shneerson : PDC05

Back from PDC

VSTO PDC sessions