Steve's ODC 2008 Client Track

Why should you attend the client sessions?

2008-02-05T20:25:00Z

As we near ODC, there are some great sessions. Last night, I went through them and provided some reasons as to why you might attend each of them.

The good thing is that with these sessions, you'll get a good cross-section of Office technologies that can be used to build many different Office solutions. I hope you enjoy this track, as it's got some great speakers with some very valuable experience.

Look forward to seeing you all there!

Steve

Session Code	Session Title	Why should you attend this session?
CLI201	The Changing Paradigm of Office Development: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow	Provides some defining boundaries of what Office development was, is and will be.
CLI202	Developing and Deploying Smart Clients for Office	VSTO 3.0 is by far the best release for this product—which is now in VS 2008 Pro and above. For those of you who really want to check out how to extend the client, this is a good primer.
CLI203	Developing Custom Office Business Applications: From the Client to SharePoint and Beyond	You’re going to hear a lot about OBA at ODC, and this is where it starts. We’ve got some good demos and info that ties smart client development (see CLI202) with MOSS (see Server tracks) and ‘beyond’ or SAP, PeopleSoft and other LOBs (see ARC305/312 & SVC307 for service and architecture guidance). Also check out CLI310 for Eric’s OBA in an hour coding extravaganza.
CLI205	The Nine Essential Power Tools for Every Developer: Extending Visual Studio to Enhance the Office Development Experience	This is all developer centric and in such a way to make your life easier when developing Office solutions.
CLI206	Integrating Office Client Customizations with Services in the Cloud	Within the theme of OBA, many companies are tying services into client customizations to build some interesting solutions. This session gives you some guidance on the how and what when it comes to integrating services into VSTO customizations.
CLI207	Leveraging Your Existing VBA Investments	There are still a lot of companies out there with VBA code and they’re not sure what to do with it. It talks about some futures, but really emphasizes the value in your current investments in VBA. A good combination with CLI209.
CLI208	Adding Geographic Information to Groove Collaboration with Virtual Earth	Geographic information systems are the craze, and you can learn some lessons for applicability not only for Groove but for other Office applications as well.
CLI209	Integrating VBA Macros and .NET Managed Code using VSTO 3.0	A good follow-on from CLI207, this session gives you the interoperability story between VBA and VSTO, but then also showcases real-world migrations of VBA to VSTO. Many companies are looking to something with their VBA code; this provides some insight into the migration path.
CLI301	Integrating WPF & WCF into Your Office Business Applications	The Huckster is a natural-born demo-God, and this session is no exception. He’s got some great demos and info on how you can integrate (where it makes sense) WCF and WPF into your OBAs.
CLI302	Integrating Unified Communications Data into Office Business Applications	Presence is becoming more popular within Office solutions. And being able to understand personal availability from within an OBA is just cool stuff!
CLI304	Developing document centric solutions using Open XML and VSTO 3.0	A good partner with CLI314, CLI307 and CLI306, this gives the developer some great info on how to create doc-centric solutions on OpenXML and VSTO.
CLI305	Access Developer Extensions: Free and Better Than Ever	One of the few Access sessions we have, but provides some great info on developer extensions.
CLI306	Using LINQ to XML to query and transform Open XML documents	LINQ is the new querying language. Seeing this applied to XML and document transformation will be very informative and interesting. Think about also attending CLI304, CLI307 and CLI314 if you’re beefing up on your OpenXML knowledge.
CLI307	Generating Enterprise Content using InfoPath 2007, SharePoint and the Microsoft SDK for Office Open XML Formats	A rare session that combines different technologies for server-side document-centric solutions.
CLI308	Creating Dynamic and Data-Bound Views in Microsoft Office Visio	Visio is being used more pervasively in the organization, and many companies are trying to do just this—integrate data into their Visio documents to make them more dynamic and real-time.
CLI309	Turning Outlook into a Front-End for Third Party Systems	Many companies are extending Outlook to build solutions into one of Office’s top productivity tools. This is an interesting session because it shows you how you can actually do this.
CLI310	Developing an Office Business Application in an Hour	Eric will show his coding magic and build an OBA in an hour. Need I say more?
CLI311	Building electronic forms with InfoPath 2007	InfoPath is a great tool that can be cross-applied to many different uses. Understanding where and when you can use it is an essential ingredient in any developer’s arsenal.
CLI312	Developing An Advanced Budgeting Application with Excel 2007	This and CLI313 provide some guidance on using the native functions of Excel to create solutions. This sessions is great in that it walks you through an existing end-to-end solution and shows you how it was done.
CLI313	What’s new in XLLs and the C API for Excel 2007?	A good partner with CLI312 to learn more about using native Excel functionality to build Excel solutions.
CLI314	Use the Open XML SDK and LINQ to XML to Program the Office Open XML File Formats	Ken always provides a great show, and this will be no exception as he talks OpenXML and LINQ, two very popular technologies within the world of Office development.

Hands-on Labs Remain the Same...

2008-02-05T02:15:00Z

I also don’t want to forget to post the HOLs again…these are the same as in my post below; it’s just a couple of the sessions that have changed. I encourage you to check these out. They’ve received good scores and are straightforward and very educational!

Session Code	Session Title	Session Level
HOL301	Binding Data to Word Content Controls	300
HOL302	Developing Custom Outlook Form Region	300
HOL303	Creating Custom Task Panes in Excel 2007	300
HOL304	Creating Custom SharePoint Workflows	300
HOL305	VBA and VSTO Interoperability	300

Cheers,

Steve

ODC is almost here!!!

2008-02-05T02:04:00Z

ODC is almost here…I can’t believe it! We’re a week out from ODC already. Time has just flown by.

Well, we’ve got a great line-up, so I thought I’d better post some updated information about who’s presenting and what they’re doing so you can begin to schedule your week next week. You’ll note that we’ve got both 200 and 300 level presentations, and some of these presentations are good segues into sessions in other tracks. For example, CLI202 and CLI203 provide some great 200 level information on OBAs, but you’ll also be able to get in-depth information on OBAs in the Services and Architecture tracks—information that provides different perspectives on a broad subject. I hope to see some of you out there next week. We do have a Visual Studio and Office booth so please feel free to drop by and see us!

Room	Time Slot	Session Code	Session Title	Speaker Name
B1/B2	Feb 11 - 13:30-14:45pm	CLI201	The Changing Paradigm of Office Development: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow	Andrew Toner
B1/B2	Feb 11 - 15:00-16:15pm	CLI202	Developing and Deploying Smart Clients for Office	Christin Boyd
A1	Feb 11 - 13:30-14:45pm	CLI203	Developing Custom Office Business Applications: From the Client to SharePoint and Beyond	Steve Fox
B1/B2	Feb 12 - 10:45-12noon	CLI205	The Nine Essential Power Tools for Every Developer: Extending Visual Studio to Enhance the Office Development Experience	Andrew Whitechapel
B1/B2	Feb 12 - 13:00-14:15pm	CLI206	Integrating Office Client Customizations with Services in the Cloud	Dave Nielsen
A1	Feb 12 - 10:45-12noon	CLI207	Leveraging Your Existing VBA Investments	Dick Moffat
A5	Feb 12 - 10:45-12noon	CLI208	Adding Geographic Information to Groove Collaboration with Virtual Earth	Michael S. Scherotter
A1	Feb 13 - 09:00-10:15am	CLI209	Integrating VBA Macros and .NET Managed Code using VSTO 3.0	Steve Hansen & Mike Wilson
B1/B2	Feb 11 - 16:30-17:45pm	CLI301	Integrating WPF & WCF into Your Office Business Applications	Tim Huckaby
A4	Feb 13 - 09:00-10:15am	CLI302	Integrating Unified Communications Data into Office Business Applications	Kyle Marsh
B1/B2	Feb 12 - 14:30-15:45pm	CLI304	Developing document centric solutions using Open XML and VSTO 3.0	Wouter van Vugt
A1	Feb 12 - 13:00-14:15pm	CLI305	Access Developer Extensions: Free and Better Than Ever	Abigail Short
A1	Feb 12 - 14:30-15:45pm	CLI306	Using LINQ to XML to query and transform Open XML documents	Eric White (Microsoft), & Johann Granados (StaffDotNet)
A1	Feb 12 - 16:15-17:30pm	CLI307	Generating Enterprise Content using InfoPath 2007, SharePoint and the Microsoft SDK for Office Open XML Formats	John Holliday
A2	Feb 12 - 16:15-17:30pm	CLI308	Creating Dynamic and Data-Bound Views in Microsoft Office Visio	Philippe-Joseph Arida
B1/B2	Feb 13 - 09:00-10:15am	CLI309	Turning Outlook into a Front-End for Third Party Systems	Ty Anderson
B1/B2	Feb 12 - 16:15-17:30pm	CLI310	Developing an Office Business Application in an Hour	Eric Carter
B1/B2	Feb 13 - 10:30-11:45am	CLI311	Building electronic forms with InfoPath 2007	Philo Janus
A1	Feb 13 - 10:30-11:45am	CLI312	Developing An Advanced Budgeting Application with Excel 2007	Dick Moffat
A5	Feb 11 - 13:30-14:45pm	CLI313	What’s new in XLLs and the C API for Excel 2007?	Danny Khen
A3	Feb 12 - 16:15-17:30pm	CLI314	Use the Open XML SDK and LINQ to XML to Program the Office Open XML File Formats	Ken Getz

You'll also want to check out the www.odc2008.com web site to see what other fun things are happening next week!

Steve

Getting Closer...

2007-12-05T08:27:00Z

Hey gang...I made a couple of small changes, but rather than creating a new blog post that repeated everything from below, I just edited my previous blog. The changes were as follows:

1. The addition of a new session called "The Nine Essential Power Toys for Every Office Developer," which is a 200-level session that will provide mostly demos on some great tools the VSTO team has built (extensions to Visual Studio) that will enhance the Office development experience; and

2. I moved the "Integrating VBA Macros and .NET Managed Code using VSTO" to 300 level. I spoke with the speaker today, and requested that we have some additional code samples so I wanted to amp this one up to 300.

3. Removed "Integrating LOB Systems with Office" as we're going to cover these in the Services track and the Architecture track.

4. Added "Building Add-ins for 64-Bit Office."

I uploaded a new Client Track map that provides a suggested navigation through the track to optimize learning.

Any questions, don't hesitate to ping me.

I'll be providing abstracts and more details on the below in the coming days and weeks sobe sure to check back and look out for those. Also, be sure to register!

Steve

List of Sessions in ODC Client Track

2007-12-01T02:21:00Z

Hey gang,

Well…I’ve got a final draft list of the client track sessions. There may be some small changes, but this is where I’m at right now. Note that I revised my earlier pillars a little and reduced them to three main themes:

- Office Smart Client – a track dedicated to helping developers understand how they can leverage the suite of Office products to build great client-side applications or extend the client to build Office-based solutions.

- Office Business Applications (OBA) – a track dedicated to helping developers understand the why, what and how of building OBAs and then also integrating other key Office technologies into their OBAs.

- Hands-on Practice – a track (comprising HOLs) that provides developers with an opportunity to get some hands-on experience in Office development.

I’ve also developed what I thought would be a good way of navigating the sessions in this track - see attached UpdatedODCClientTrack.jpg. This gives you some insight into the ways in which I’ve tried to structure the tracks and the ways in which you might cross-navigate the different areas to maximize your time in this track. I will be putting together a cross-track map so you can get a sense for how you might navigate the sessions across all of the tracks to optimize your learning at ODC.

Also, I’d be interested in hearing any comments (or questions) you have for this track. I wanted to provide broad coverage across the Office system at the same time provide some coverage of new and exciting technologies (e.g. WPF, LINQ, etc.) that developers really want to learn more about.

Office Smart Client

Title	Level	Speaker
CL203: The Changing Paradigm of Office Development: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow	200	Andrew Toner
CL204:Developing and Deploying Smart Clients for Office	200	Christin Boyd
CL205:Integrating Office Client Customizations with Hosted Web Services	200	Dave Nielsen
CL206: The Nine Essential Power Tools for Every Office Developer	200	Andrew Whitechapel
CL207:Adding Geographic Information to Groove Collaboration with Virtual Earth	200	Michael S. Scherotter
CL208: Leveraging Your Existing VBA Investments	200	Dick Moffat
CLCT209:Customer Insights: Converting Your VBA Macros to .NET Managed Code	200	Naveen Yajaman
CL306:Creating Dynamic and Data-Bound Views in Microsoft Office Visio	300	Philippe-Joseph Arida
CL307:Building Electronic Forms with InfoPath 2007	300	Philo Janus
CL308: Developing Document Centric Solutions using Open XML and VSTO 3.0	300	Wouter Van Vugt
CL309:Generating Enterprise Content using InfoPath 2007, SharePoint and the Microsoft SDK for Office Open XML Formats	300	John Holliday
CL310:Turning Outlook into a Front-End for Third Party Systems	300	Marc Hoppers
CL311: Building Office Add-ins for 64-Bit Office	300	Erick Rucker
CL312: Access Developer Extensions: Free and Better Than Ever	300	Abigail E. Short
CL313: Building Manageable Data Applications on SharePoint with Access 2007	300	Erick Rucker
CL314: Integrating VBA Macro and .NET Managed Code using VSTO 3.0	300	Steve Hansen

Office Business Applications (OBAs)

Title	Level	Speaker
CL201: Developing Custom Office Business Applications: From the Client to SharePoint and Beyond	200	Steve Fox
CL202:Extending and Customizing Duet	200	Ian Tien
CLCT210:Customer Insights: Visual Studio Tools for SharePoint	200	John Durant
CL301:Integrating WPF & WCF into Your Office Business Applications	300	Tim Huckaby
CL302:Integrating Unified Communications Data into Office Business Applications	300	Chris Mayo
CL304:Integrating Business Applications into Office using the BizTak Adapter Pack	300	Joe Klug
CL305:Achieving Fit and Finish: Creating Product-Quality User Experiences in Custom Office and SharePoint solutions	300	Paul Robinson

Hands-on Coding

Session Title	Session Level
CLHOL301:Binding Data to Word Content Controls	300
CLHOL302:Developing Custom Outlook Form Region	300
CLHOL303:Creating Custom Task Pane in Excel 2007 Add-in	300
CLHOL304:Creating Custom SharePoint Workflow	300
CLHOL305:VBA and VSTO Interoperability	300

As I continue to finalize the details on each of these, I will post more information about them. I hope to see you all out there at ODC, and please remember to post any comments/feedback to me.

Have a great weekend!

Steve

Some Info on the Client Track Sessions...

2007-11-29T01:59:00Z

Wow, I've been out of communication for a while and I apologize for that. I was on the road again after the Las Vegas and Munich trip to go to Las Vegas again (for DevConnections) and then to San Francisco (for Oracle OpenWorld). The conferences offered some great insight into what companies are trying to do in terms of Office development. However, I'll come back to this in future posts; first, let's talk about my thoughts on sessions for the client track as I've had a few mails from people on this. (The caveat is that we're not quite done solidifying the sessions, but we're almost there - so there may be some changes looking forward.)

Over the past week, I've been trying to trim down the ODC client list. To help me, I created four main themes, under which I've been slotting specific sessions that address different technologies in an attempt to get good coverage across topical technologies and Office products. The themes I want to address are: Office Business Applications (OBA), Building a Smart Client, Hands-on Coding, and Customer Feedback. I've pretty much baked the first three, but am still thinking about that last one. The technologies I've currently got on my list (in terms of integrating with Offce solutions or using to build Office solutions) range from VS 2008/VSTO 3.0, MOSS, UC, WPF, WCF, WF, LOB System Integration, OpenXML, ClickOnce deployment, and more. I will also be providing developers with a conference road-map - i.e. a map that will recommend how they might best spend their time at the event to build certain skills and target specific development goals. The sessions will also touch upon many different core Office products, such as Outlook, Word, Excel, MOSS, Visio, and Groove.

While not a complete list, here are a few sessions I've got on my current list under the aforementioned themes:

Developing Custom Office Business Applications: From the Client to SharePoint and Beyond

Integrating WPF & WCF into Your Office Business Applications

Developing Document Centric Solutions using Open XML and VSTO 3.0

Turning Outlook into a Front-End for Third Party Systems

Some great speakers that I'd like to highlight that will be speaking in the client track are Tim Huckaby, John Holliday, John Durant, Juergen Daiberl, and Marc Hoppers. I will be posting more as I finalize the actual sessions - very likely in the next few days.

In the meantime, make sure you get the early-bird offer and register for ODC. You can find more information here:

https://microsoft.crgevents.com/ODC2008/Content/default.aspx?p=E7KTGB

Talk with you all soon!

Steve

Fresh off of SAP TechEd

2007-10-28T03:09:00Z

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

Welcome to the ODC Client Track!

2007-10-15T23:28:00Z

Welcome Office Developers!

My name is Steve Fox, and I'm a Program Manager at Microsoft who's in charge of the Office Developer Conference (ODC) Client Development track. My main focus here at MSFT is engaging with customers (e.g. developers, business decision makers, architects, etc.) to do two main things: i) to teach developers about Office Business Applications (OBAs) - which includes client-side development through Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) and SharePoint development and ii) to gather feedback from developers to help improve future versions of our product. I attend a lot of the developer conferences, so if I have not met you before I hope that we can meet and chat at ODC.

I'll be posting regularly as we move towards ODC and will keep you updated with information about each of the sessions and their speakers, any updates on changes or news you should know about, and anything else that I feel is useful. At the outset, I will say that this ODC is shaping up to be very exciting. The proposition of developing applications that extend from the client to SharePoint and beyond (e.g. integrating SAP, MSFT Dynamics, PeopleSoft, etc. into the information worker experience) is one that has become a reality - and for many companies a major IT investment. For those that attend, you'll be able to learn more about how to do some of this and you'll learn what is coming in future versions of Office - a sort of sneak peak.

Well, I just wanted this to be a welcome message and to let you know that I'll be posting more information as soon as I have it. So, please check back regularly!

Until then, have a great day!

Steve