Hey gang,

Well, I've spent the last couple of weeks on the road; first in Las Vegas and then in Munich - both for SAP TechEd. It was great to see so much interest in .NET, Office and SAP interoperability. If you haven't heard too much about this type of integration, there is a lot of momentum behind it within the area of developing Office Business Applications (OBAs). OBAs tie together the Office client, the SharePoint Server (plus other Office server products but primarily SharePoint), and LOB Systems (such as SAP, PeopleSoft, Dynamics, etc.) so discussing Office/.NET/SAP interoperability in the context of OBAs resinated very well with developers at both SAP TechEds.

While you can spend a lot of time with the underlying technologies to build these composite applications called OBAs (such as MOSS, OpenXML, Visual Studio, and so on), when we talk about the client one of the more potent client-side development technologies is VSTO - especially VSTO 3.0 which ships in Visual Studio 2008 Professional SKU and above. You can find a ton of interesting and helpful material on the VSTO Developer Portal (see http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa905533.aspx), and you can also find some great information on the Office Developer Portal as well (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/default.aspx). You can also check out the OBA Starter Kit for SAP if you're looking for specific integration information on how to tie SAP and Office together using VSTO (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb498189.aspx). It is based off of 2005 SE, but look out for more info on future revs in the coming months. Also, check out OBA Central for some creative ways our partners are building the clients for their OBAs using VSTO (www.obacentral.com).

I mention VSTO in this blog post, because this will be one of the client-side development technologies that we'll be discussing at ODC. And while we're still in the process of baking our final sessions, I wanted to throw this out there to all of you Office developers - professional and hobbyists alike - so you can check out this technology and come prepared to ODC with questions or issues that we can work through together. Version 3.0 represents quite a milestone for this product, with what I think are some great improvements - e.g. visual ribbon designer to create a custom Office ribbon, custom Outlook form region generation, support for WPF, WCF and LINQ, ClickOnce deployment, databinding to Word content controls, VBA to VSTO managed code interoperability, among a number of other great features. You can download the Beta 2 of Visual Studio here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/bb655861.aspx. It's a free download, so check it out!

Well, I'm back on the road going to DevConnections in Las Vegas and then Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco where in both places I'll be presenting on Office Development and LOB System Interoperability. If you're going to either of these, feel free to either stop by the Office Development booth or grab me for a conversation after my session!

Well, until my next blog post have a great day and keep on coding!!!

Steve

One of the