Integrating business systems with Office and SharePoint

» Integrating business systems with Office and SharePoint Microsoft CRM Development Information: Information and Research on Microsoft CRM Development

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 01:33:22 GMT

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re: Integrating business systems with Office and SharePoint

Mark Gordon — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 22:42:32 GMT

Hi Soma,

This is interesting ...

"Here at Microsoft, we use Siebel for managing CRM. Until we integrated Siebel with Outlook and SharePoint, it just wasn’t delivering the value that a CRM system should. "

We feel the same way about Visual Studio... Until it has a true data centric langauge like FoxPro and native data binding it just is not delivering the value a true software development environment should.

Regards,

Mark

re: Integrating business systems with Office and SharePoint

Vivek — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 05:42:20 GMT

Hi Soma,

Thanks for sharing the information. Here is a FAQ from the mssharepointconference.com

The SharePoint conference is primarily intended for those in IT who use, deploy, and configure SharePoint. If you are focused on SharePoint deployment, or want to expand your skills in this area, you should attend the SharePoint Conference. However, if you are a SharePoint developer you should attend Office System Developer Conference.

I am a developer and this information was not provided to me at the time when I was registering for the SharePoint conference (so enthusiastically!). Now I am totally disappointed to know that if I am a developer I should attend Office System Developer Conference. What can I do?

Thanks for any pointers!

re: Integrating business systems with Office and SharePoint

Somasegar — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 10:39:04 GMT

Hi Vivek,

Sorry for any confusion. For anyone who feels they should have registered for ODC instead of SPC because of their development focus, we can arrange a registration transfer. Please send an email to the following addresses and request a registration transfer: ODC2008@microsoft.crgevents.com

-somasegar

re: Integrating business systems with Office and SharePoint

Flannigan — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 12:40:18 GMT

Hey Somasegar,

Is there a reason Microsoft could not create a namespace built upon the VFP command and function language contructs to access SQL Server similar to how FoxPro accessed DBF files?

That would greatly assist us and complete the Visual Studio Development Environment. I realize there is a VFP namespace on the MSDN FoxPro website but it is not offically supported. I am confused why Microsoft would not want to implement this capability.

Thanks in advance for the reply,

Brian Flannigan

Soma's blog post on Office development and Visual Studio

Office Business Applications (OBA) Team Blog — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 21:02:12 GMT

Soma Somasegar (VP, dev div) posted an interesting post on Office development recently. Here's the link:

Soma's blog post on Office development and Visual Studio

Noticias externas — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 21:30:44 GMT

Soma Somasegar (VP, dev div) posted an interesting post on Office development recently. Here's the

re: Integrating business systems with Office and SharePoint

Alan Griver — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 23:43:08 GMT

Hey Brian,

Just to be clear, Fox’s functions do not access SQL Server. As you know, they access a cursor (typically created with a remote view) that can be written back to SQL Server via functions like TableUpdate(). VFP uses the model of moving anything into a cursor (even DBF data) and working on that. Similarly, .NET does that using objects. So, ADO.NET provides Datasets that act like VFP cursors and can update back to the back end via a method call. Linq to SQL also provides a similar model – you create the “view” (objects in Linq to SQL) that model the database, work on those objects and have the context update at the end.

So, the approach is similar – you move the data into a local “thing” and work on that “thing”. In VFP that is a cursor, in .NET it is a set of objects.

re: Integrating business systems with Office and SharePoint

Vivek — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 03:09:42 GMT

Hi Somasegar,

I have been desperately trying to transfer my registration from SPC to ODC with no luck. I have tried emailing the ODC2008@microsoft.crgevents.com and this is what I received:

-- begin --

Thank you for your email. Unfortunately, the registration process for the March event is completely separate from the February ODC registration. We only have access to the ODC registration site. Please create a new registration for this event at https://microsoft.crgevents.com/ODC2008/Register. If you do not wish to attend the event in March, please cancel that registration. Let me know if you have any further questions.

Best Regards,

Colleen

Office System Developer Conference 2008

www.ODC2008.com

ODC2008@microsoft.crgevents.com

-- end --

I have also tried requesting our regional Microsoft representative with no luck. Should not there be any way to transfer the registration? I am very disappointed that I will be missing a great conference and on top of it I have to forfeit 100% of my SPC registration fee.

Thanks!

re: Integrating business systems with Office and SharePoint

khawara — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 04:12:03 GMT

Hi Vivek,

sorry about that - we sent instructions yesterday to honor any such requests. Please contact me directly (khawar.ahmed [at] microsoft.com) and I'll get this sorted out for you. We have done such transfers and will do any if requested.

- Khawar

re: Integrating business systems with Office and SharePoint

Flannigan — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 07:26:23 GMT

Hey Somasegar,

Thank you for the reply and giving me an opportunity to voice my opinion. Of course you are correct FoxPro accesses SQL and stores data into cursors. With Visual Studio there seems to be room for improvement when accessing data in middle tier business objects. Many of the calculations that occur in this layer are row based not set based at least in the applications that I develop.

While you can perform row based calculation in Visual Studio with table adapters and/or data readers there seems to be alot more coding and overhead involved then there really needs to be. There are numerous times I wish I could create a cursor from a select statement and had a simple scan function with a for clause, seek/locate statement and scatter to object command to work with. These functions alone would reduce alot of code.

I understand Visual Studio maps data and row into objects and in some cases it makes coding easy however there are other times I would perfer if VS treated data more along the lines of a cursor not an object so we could perform our calculations and then dispose of the cursor when finished.

Having both methods of handling data would be the best of both worlds.

Thanks again sir for your time.

Brian Flannigan

re: Integrating business systems with Office and SharePoint

Vivek — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 17:18:13 GMT

Thanks Soma and Khawar!

An ODC representative contacted me personally and informed me that they can honor my request.

ooof...I am so relieved now...off to San Jose!

re: Integrating business systems with Office and SharePoint

Somasegar — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 20:28:30 GMT

Vivek,

I am glad we sorted it out. Hopefully the conference will be both informative and fun.

-somasegar

Building OBAs with WPF, WCF, and LINQ

Zlatan's Blog — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:32:02 GMT

One thing is for sure, using Visual Studio Tools for Office in the new Visual Studio 2008 environment

Building OBAs with WPF, WCF, and LINQ

Owner Blog — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 20:05:47 GMT

One thing is for sure, using Visual Studio Tools for Office in the new Visual Studio 2008 environment

re: Integrating business systems with Office and SharePoint

Andrew W — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 13:29:54 GMT

Whilst this is most welcome for people using the Professional edition I am beginning to wonder what incentive there is to continue with the VSTS Developer edition. I purchased this + msdn premium under a 3yr open value agreement and opted for TSDev as this included both the Mobile Device Support and Office Development ability which were not at the time available in Professional. Both are now available in Professional. At the other end of the scale Team Suite has acquired the Database role and Expression Suite. Most of my development is now around WPF and I like the improvements to VS2008 in this area. The Code analysis and additional profiling functionality is very useful. However again the Expression offering is identical in both Professional and TSDev. I increasingly do more TDD and could use some of the functinality that is in the Test role edition and increasingly offerings like MBUnit + Rhinomocks look more attractive. When I come to renew what incentive is there to keep the Dev option it seems that the professional edition gives me what I need (although I would miss profiling) and I can use the money saved to upgrade to the Expression Suite? Do you see the Team roles adapting?