Steve Fox's OBA Ramblings : OBA platform

OBA Sample Application Kit for SAP & Siebel Released to Web

Steve Fox — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:57:09 GMT

Over the past few months, we’ve received some very positive feedback on the OBA Sample Application Kits that we’ve released. Well, today we release to web the latest in the family of kits, the OBA Sample Application Kit for SAP & Siebel. Included in this kit are:

Overview whitepaper
Source code
Installation guide
Developer guide

As per the diagram below, this latest OBA kit provides guidance on how developers can integrate Outlook and MOSS 2007 with Siebel and SAP. It integrates a variety of key MS technologies (e.g. BizTalk LOB adapters, WCF, VSTO, and so on) to help you understand how you can integrate LOB systems such as Siebel and SAP into your Office and SharePoint solutions.

The actual developer kit can be found here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/sapsiebel. And for more information on other OBA developer kits, you can go here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/cc442491.aspx.

Enjoy!

Steve

Another Office Customization with Beta 1 – Excel Add-in with Custom Task Pane

Steve Fox — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 02:07:45 GMT

I recently downloaded the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 and have been playing around with the different features for Office Business Application development. For the public Beta 1, you’ll be limited to the 2007-centric templates (e.g. Excel 2007 Add-in, Word 2007 Document, etc.), but the nice thing is that if you’re familiar with these templates when future Betas are released you’ll already have had a chance to get experience with the Beta 1. That said, I presented at a customer conference this week and one of the demos I showed was an Excel Add-in that used a sales cube. This was a 2007-centric HOL that we built for developers, which I’ve posted here: http://cid-40a717fc7fcd7e40.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/VSTO%7C_HOLs.

To test out the new bits, I upgraded one of the samples from the HOL. One of the requests that I had was to post the updated code (the Beta 1) for folks. So here it is for you: http://cid-40a717fc7fcd7e40.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/Beta1%7C_OBA.

The code is zipped and some details on the code are as follows:

Unzip into a folder on your c: drive (e.g. c:\OBA).
Ensure that you have added the resources in the Settings tab of your Properties – see figure below. To see the properties, click Project, Properties and then click the Settings tab. Make sure you also add the other two settings as per the below.
Also, ensure that the resource files (that are in the Settings tab) are also copied from the Resources folder into the folder you add as a string setting.

Once you’ve configured the above four settings, you should be able to F5 and run the application. When you invoke the application, you can filter on the cube (from the custom task pane) and then click the Generate Forecast button to load the data in the Excel template. The figure below shows the finished product.

In the coming weeks, I’ll post some additional samples for Office with the Beta 1 bits.

Happy coding!

Steve

Technorati Tags: MSDN,OBA,Office Business Application,Office Development

Web Services and SharePoint: How do I do it?

Steve Fox — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 08:03:00 GMT

When building an OBA, you’re often going to want to either integrate with the native Web services for SharePoint (when I say SharePoint, in this instance I’m referring to both the WSS and the MOSS services) or you’ll want to create your own custom services. The question often comes up is how? In this post, I’ll show you a couple of different ways of doing this by creating a custom client app that achieves the same thing (i.e., inserts a record into a SharePoint list). Before we get to the client app, though, let’s quickly review a few of the more common ways that we can deploy a service:

ASMX Web service that is deployed into the SharePoint hive (e.g. deployed into the _vti_bin or _layouts folder;
ASMX Web service deployed to its own Web application domain;
WCF service deployed into the _vti_bin or _layouts folder; and
WCF service deployed into its own Web application domain.

When deploying an ASMX service into the _vti_bin, there are a few things that you need to do in order to prepare your service to be supportable by SharePoint. While based on VS 2005, you can apply the same methods for VS 2008 by using the article here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms464040.aspx. Most important to remember are:

Add DLL to GAC;
Run Disco tool against ASMX file;
Add the appropriate amendments to the .dsco and .wsdl files (see the aforementioned article);
Rename the x.dsco and x.wsdl files to be xdsco.aspx and xwsdl.aspx;
Copy the .asmx file, xwsdl.aspx and xdisco.aspx files to the _vti_bin folder.

When deploying a service (ASMX or WCF) to its own web app domain, you need to first make sure you create and publish your web service to a folder on your application server and then map that folder to an IIS web site. To do this:

Open IIS;
Create a New Web Site;
Map the Path to the folder where your service is published;
Set Permissions (use either ASP.NET Impersonation or Windows Authentication and set to Enabled); and
Refresh the view of your site.

Now you’ll likely need what is called a client access policy or cross-domain policy file, which are files that are required for cross-domain calls into SharePoint. You may also need to have the files in your published web site root folder as well as having them in your SharePoint site root folder. Note: While you can copy and paste the policy files into your IIS web site, remember that you should use SharePoint Designer to open the SharePoint site and then copy the policy files to the root directory of the site. Here is a snapshot of what the root folder in my Content View of IIS (7.0) looks like:

When deploying a WCF service to SharePoint, you need to remember that you must create a VirtualPathProvider because SharePoint doesn’t support the loading of .svc files. A good summary of how to do this is here: http://blah.winsmarts.com/2008-5-SharePoint_2007_as_a_WCF_host_-_Step_-4,_Write_a_Virtual_Path_Provider.aspx.

If you use the native Web services that ship with SharePoint (e.g. Lists, Excel Services, or BDC), you can simply open up a VS project and add these to your project. To discover the services, click Add a Web Reference and then click the Web services on this local machine (presumably you’ve got SharePoint on that machine), and then all of the SharePoint services will be listed.

In my example, I’ll show you how to call a custom web service (that uses WCF and ASMX deployed to their own IIS web sites) and a native SharePoint web service that does the same thing as the custom code. The custom code in my service that I’m using to insert the record into a SharePoint list called “TR8” is listed as follows (at least this is how it looks for the ASMX service):

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.Services;
using Microsoft.SharePoint;

[WebService(Namespace = "http://tempuri.org/")]
[WebServiceBinding(ConformsTo = WsiProfiles.BasicProfile1_1)]
// To allow this Web Service to be called from script, using ASP.NET AJAX, uncomment the following line.
// [System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptService]
public class UpdateSharePointList : System.Web.Services.WebService
{
public UpdateSharePointList () {

        //Uncomment the following line if using designed components
        //InitializeComponent();
    }

    [WebMethod]
    public void useNormalMOSSApi(string SalesSPSite, string productName, string productNumber, string FY08Sales)
    {
        string strDashListRoot = SalesSPSite;

        using (SPSite site = new SPSite(strDashListRoot))
        {
            using (SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb())
            {
                web.AllowUnsafeUpdates = true;

                SPList list = web.Lists["TR8"];
                SPListItem Item = list.Items.Add();
                Item["Title"] = productName;
                Item["ProductNum"] = productNumber;
                Item["Sales"] = FY08Sales;
                Item.Update();
            }
        }

}
}

The core code is similar for the WCF service; however, the major differences are standard WCF/ASMX differences—e.g. uses contracts as opposed to Web method declarations, and so on. After I created the services, I then added them to a VS 2008 project using the Add Service and Add Web Reference functions within VS. Here’s a snapshot of my project, so you can see all of the standard references, WCF reference and ASMX references (both the native SharePoint Lists.asmx reference and the custom ASMX service I built).

Okay, enough on the service side; let’s take a look at the client code.

In this example, I built a simple client UI to test out a couple of different services. The following UI shows the form:

You can see that the form accepts a SharePoint site (selected from a combo-box), three separate user entries from textboxes (product name, product number, and sales), and then another input (type of service to call when executing the insertion of the record into SharePoint) from the other combo-box.

In the code-behind my WinForm app, I’ve first got four key class-level variables that I’ll use to contain the input from the above form:

string productName = "";
string productNumber = "";
string FY08Sales = "";
string SalesSPSite = "";

Then, when the user clicks the Add button (which corresponds to the btnGetSPLists_Click event), the application looks at the Type of Service control entry and then calls a specific method to handle the specific type of service.

private void btnGetSPLists_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
     //Setting the variables to link to specific site
     SalesSPSite = cmboBxSPSite.SelectedItem.ToString();
     productName = txtBxProduct.Text;
     productNumber = txtBxProductNum.Text;
     FY08Sales = txtBoxSales.Text;

     //User can set whether they can call the service or not.
     if (cmbBxService.SelectedItem.ToString() == "Native SharePoint Web Service")
     {
         useSPListWebService(
             SalesSPSite, productName, productNumber, FY08Sales);
     }
     else if (cmbBxService.SelectedItem.ToString() == "Standard SharePoint API")
     {
         useNormalMOSSApi(
             SalesSPSite, productName, productNumber, FY08Sales);
     }
                 else if (cmbBxService.SelectedItem.ToString() == "WCF Service")
     {
         useWCFService(
             SalesSPSite, productName, productNumber, FY08Sales);
     }
     else if (cmbBxService.SelectedItem.ToString() == "ASP.NET Web Service")
     {
         useASMXService(
             SalesSPSite, productName, productNumber, FY08Sales);
     }

}

The conditional code in the btnGetSPLists_Click event sets the class-level variables and then calls one of four different methods depending on what the user has selected.

One of the selections calls the ASMX code (which is the native Lists.asmx web service):

//1. Using the Native SP Web Service.
private void useSPListWebService(string SalesSPSite, string productName, string productNumber, string FY08Sales)
{
// Declare and initialize a variable for the Lists Web Service.
TR8_ListServiceCall.SPListService.Lists listService = new TR8_ListServiceCall.SPListService.Lists();

//Authenticate to the current user.
listService.Credentials = System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;

//Set the Url property of the service for the path to a subsite.
listService.Url = SalesSPSite + "/_vti_bin/Lists.asmx";

      //Get Name attribute values (GUIDs) for list and view.
      System.Xml.XmlNode ndListView = listService.GetListAndView("TR8", "");
      string strListID = ndListView.ChildNodes[0].Attributes["Name"].Value;
      string strViewID = ndListView.ChildNodes[1].Attributes["Name"].Value;

      //Create an XmlDocument object and construct a Batch element
      //and its attributes.
      System.Xml.XmlDocument doc = new System.Xml.XmlDocument();
      System.Xml.XmlElement batchElement = doc.CreateElement("Batch");

//Create a CAML construct to insert data into the field into the TR8 list.
batchElement.InnerXml = "<Method ID='1' Cmd='New'><Field Name='Title'>" + productName + "</Field><Field Name='ProductNum'>" + productNumber + "</Field><Field Name='Sales'>" + FY08Sales + "</Field>" + "</Method>";

      //Call the UpdateListItems method to insert the record into the list.
      XmlNode ndReturn = listService.UpdateListItems(strListID, batchElement);
      MessageBox.Show("Record Added (Via Web Service)");

}

One of the selections calls the normal MOSS API (which is essentially the custom code that runs directly against my SharePoint server):

//2. Using the Normal SP API.
private void useNormalMOSSApi(string SalesSPSite, string productName, string productNumber, string FY08Sales)
{

string strDashListRoot = SalesSPSite;

           using (SPSite site = new SPSite(strDashListRoot))
           {
               using (SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb())
               {
                   web.AllowUnsafeUpdates = true;

                   SPList list = web.Lists["TR8"];
                   SPListItem Item = list.Items.Add();
                   Item["Title"] = productName;
                   Item["ProductNum"] = productNumber;
                   Item["Sales"] = FY08Sales;
                   Item.Update();
                   MessageBox.Show("Record Added (Via API)");
               }
           }

}

One of the selections calls my custom ASMX service:

//3. Using the ASMX Service.
private void useASMXService(string SalesSPSite, string productName, string productNumber, string FY08Sales)
{
    TR8_ListServiceCall.ASMX_WebService.TR8ASPWebService myService = new TR8_ListServiceCall.ASMX_WebService.TR8ASPWebService();
    myService.UseDefaultCredentials = true;
    myService.useNormalMOSSApi(SalesSPSite, productName, productNumber, FY08Sales);
    MessageBox.Show("Record Added (Via ASMX)");
    myService.Dispose();

}

And the last of the selections calls my custom WCF service:

//4. Using the WCF Service.
private void useWCFService(string SalesSPSite, string productName, string productNumber, string FY08Sales)
{
    TR8_ListServiceCall.WCF_SPListService.InsertItemsClient proxy = new TR8_ListServiceCall.WCF_SPListService.InsertItemsClient();
    proxy.useNormalMOSSApi(SalesSPSite, productName, productNumber, FY08Sales);
    MessageBox.Show("Record Added (Via WCF)");
    proxy.Close();

}

Each of these calls does exactly the same thing: inserts a record using the data from the input form into the SharePoint list called “TR8.” Note, though, that there are syntactical differences. For example, for the custom services we are really executing the code inside the custom service so we need the proxy, the default windows credentials, and the calling of the specific web method (useNormalMOSSApi) to add the entries. And of course don’t forget to dispose/close the service to clean up your sessions.

The biggest syntactical difference from the above, though, is the native Lists.asmx web service. Note the use of the CAML construct to create the XML ‘document’ that represents the data we’re inserting into the list. A tip here is if you’re going to use this method, the ‘field’ attribute in the CAML construct is not the column display name. To get the proper attribute, go to your SharePoint site, click List Settings, and then click the column in question. Note at the end of the URL is the field name. In the below figure, you can see ‘Field=Sales’ – this is the correct field attribute to use. (Hopefully, this will save you troubleshooting XML errors.)

So, the only remaining code is that which corresponds to the other buttons, which is fairly self-explanatory.

//Events to handle the clearing of the controls.
private void ctnClear_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
     txtBoxSales.Clear();
     txtBxProduct.Clear();
     txtBxProductNum.Clear();
}

//Event to exit the application.
private void btnExit_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
Application.Exit();
}

When executing the code, what will happen is that you can insert records from the client app via a service that then update the SharePoint list. So, why is this cool? Because you can use the same method described above to interact with many different areas of SharePoint—expanding the breadth of your OBA to include OM calls and data management with SharePoint. Here’s a final view of what the end result of the above code (selecting and executing each of the services in my Type of Service combo-box) looks like:

Note that I’ve added the complete code-behind for my sample app below.

Hope this helps you in your quest!

Steve

Complete Code-Behind for the WinForm App

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Data;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using Microsoft.SharePoint;
using System.Collections;
using System.Data.SqlClient;
using System.Xml.Linq;
using System.Xml;
using System.Xml.Serialization;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.SoapServer;
using System.ServiceModel;

namespace TR8_ListServiceCall
{
    public partial class Form1 : Form
    {
        //Class-level variables
       string productName = "";
       string productNumber = "";
       string FY08Sales = "";
       string SalesSPSite = "";

        public Form1()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
        }

        private void btnGetSPLists_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            //Setting the variables to link to specific site
            SalesSPSite = cmboBxSPSite.SelectedItem.ToString();
            productName = txtBxProduct.Text;
            productNumber = txtBxProductNum.Text;
            FY08Sales = txtBoxSales.Text;

            //User can set whether they can call the service or not.
            if (cmbBxService.SelectedItem.ToString() == "Native SharePoint Web Service")
            {
                useSPListWebService(
                    SalesSPSite, productName, productNumber, FY08Sales);
            }
            else if (cmbBxService.SelectedItem.ToString() == "Standard SharePoint API")
            {
                useNormalMOSSApi(
                    SalesSPSite, productName, productNumber, FY08Sales);
            }
                        else if (cmbBxService.SelectedItem.ToString() == "WCF Service")
            {
                useWCFService(
                    SalesSPSite, productName, productNumber, FY08Sales);
            }
            else if (cmbBxService.SelectedItem.ToString() == "ASP.NET Web Service")
            {
                useASMXService(
                    SalesSPSite, productName, productNumber, FY08Sales);
            }

}

        //1. Using the Normal SP API.
        private void useNormalMOSSApi(string SalesSPSite, string productName, string productNumber, string FY08Sales)
        {

string strDashListRoot = SalesSPSite;

            using (SPSite site = new SPSite(strDashListRoot))
            {
                using (SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb())
                {
                    web.AllowUnsafeUpdates = true;

                    SPList list = web.Lists["TR8"];
                    SPListItem Item = list.Items.Add();
                    Item["Title"] = productName;
                    Item["ProductNum"] = productNumber;
                    Item["Sales"] = FY08Sales;
                    Item.Update();
                    MessageBox.Show("Record Added (Via API)");
                }
            }

}

        //2. Using the Native SP Web Service.
        private void useSPListWebService(string SalesSPSite, string productName, string productNumber, string FY08Sales)
        {
            // Declare and initialize a variable for the Lists Web Service.
            TR8_ListServiceCall.SPListService.Lists listService = new TR8_ListServiceCall.SPListService.Lists();

//Authenticate to the current user.
listService.Credentials = System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;

//Set the Url property of the service for the path to a subsite.
listService.Url = SalesSPSite + "/_vti_bin/Lists.asmx";

            //Get Name attribute values (GUIDs) for list and view.
            System.Xml.XmlNode ndListView = listService.GetListAndView("TR8", "");
            string strListID = ndListView.ChildNodes[0].Attributes["Name"].Value;
            string strViewID = ndListView.ChildNodes[1].Attributes["Name"].Value;

            //Create an XmlDocument object and construct a Batch element
            //and its attributes.
            System.Xml.XmlDocument doc = new System.Xml.XmlDocument();
            System.Xml.XmlElement batchElement = doc.CreateElement("Batch");

            //Call the UpdateListItems method to insert the record into the list.
            XmlNode ndReturn = listService.UpdateListItems(strListID, batchElement);
            MessageBox.Show("Record Added (Via Web Service)");

}

        //3. Using the ASMX Service.
        private void useASMXService(string SalesSPSite, string productName, string productNumber, string FY08Sales)
        {
            TR8_ListServiceCall.ASMX_WebService.TR8ASPWebService myService = new TR8_ListServiceCall.ASMX_WebService.TR8ASPWebService();
            myService.UseDefaultCredentials = true;
            myService.useNormalMOSSApi(SalesSPSite, productName, productNumber, FY08Sales);
            MessageBox.Show("Record Added (Via ASMX)");
            myService.Dispose();

}

        //4. Using the WCF Service.
        private void useWCFService(string SalesSPSite, string productName, string productNumber, string FY08Sales)
        {
            TR8_ListServiceCall.WCF_SPListService.InsertItemsClient proxy = new TR8_ListServiceCall.WCF_SPListService.InsertItemsClient();
            proxy.useNormalMOSSApi(SalesSPSite, productName, productNumber, FY08Sales);
            MessageBox.Show("Record Added (Via WCF)");
            proxy.Close();

}

        //Events to handle the clearing of the controls.
        private void ctnClear_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            txtBoxSales.Clear();
            txtBxProduct.Clear();
            txtBxProductNum.Clear();
        }

        //Event to exit the application.
        private void btnExit_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            Application.Exit();
        }
    }
}

Learn how to integrate PeopleSoft, Outlook and MOSS

Steve Fox — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 06:51:09 GMT

Office Business Application (OBA) development is growing in importance thus continues to be an integral part of the Office platform developer story. To that end, we recently completed a new resource that could be used for OBA training specific to PeopleSoft and Office integration. This HOL uses the OBA Starter Kit for PeopleSoft as the demo environment and provides a comprehensive walkthrough on how to a) create web services that wrap around PeopleSoft components (both native and custom), b) consume those services in a custom Outlook client (the design can be extrapolated to other Office custom clients), and c) integrate the service with the MOSS Business Data Catalog.

The new resource, a hands-on lab that is now publicly available, is a great way for you or your customers to get ramped up on how to integrate Office and PeopleSoft.

The OBA Starter Kit for PeopleSoft is available here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/cc442491.aspx

The new OBA PeopleSoft Hands-on Lab is available here: http://www.microsoft.com/isv/oracle/

Enjoy!

Steve

Create Your First OBA: Part 5

Steve Fox — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 23:29:00 GMT

Hey gang,

It's been a while since I've posted, but I've been on the road. I attended TechEd 2008 (USA), our internal field conference TechReady 7, and then travelled to South Africa to TechEd 2008 (S. Africa). Now, I'm back in Seattle--albeit a little jet-lagged. Over the past few weeks, I've continued to give talks on OBA, but have been doing a lot more SharePoint lately--especially Silverlight and SharePoint (I'll put some blog posts up about this in the near future).

In the past, I've been doing a lot of writing in my blogs, so for this blog I put together a short screen-cast to go along with the blog. Essentially, in this blog I'm going to show you how you can create a Business Data Catalog (BDC) web part in SharePoint using the Business Data Catalog Definition Editor. Specifically, the web part will actually implement a couple of web methods from a Web service. I get this question a lot, so I really wanted to make this a part of the OBA series. (Plus, the BDC is one of the more common objects that SharePoint developers use.) This is part 5 of the Create Your First OBA series (Customizing SharePoint (BDC)):

1.       Creating the VSTO document-level solution (i.e. the custom document);
2.       Deploying the VSTO document-level solution;
3.       Integrating the VSTO with SharePoint content type;
4.       Associating SharePoint workflow with VSTO document-level solution;
5.       Customizing SharePoint (BDC);
6.       Customizing SharePoint (Excel Services).

Before you get started, a couple of notes on your environment. You can download the MOSS 2007 SDK from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=6D94E307-67D9-41AC-B2D6-0074D6286FA9&displaylang=en. The SDK contains the BDC Definition Editor, which you will use to create the application definition file (ADF)--a metadata representation of the data source that you're connecting to with the BDC web part. I also used VS 2008 to create my Web service, which I deployed to my local Win 2003 Server which was also running MOSS (Enterprise edition). The BDC is available in the MOSS Enterprise Edition, so if you're looking to use the BDC you'll need to make sure you have this MOSS SKU installed.

Okay, so below I've added a Silverlight video player with the WMV screencast embedded in it:

If you have any problems with this, you can also get the WMV directly here: http://silverlight.services.live.com/75885/How%20to%20Create%20a%20BDC%20Web%20Part%20that%20Consumes%20a%20Web%20Method/video.wmv.

Have a great day!

Steve

Interesting OBA Blog on DITA...

Steve Fox — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 05:14:00 GMT

A colleague sent this to me today...thought it was interesting, so I thought I'd pass along to you all.

http://blogs.msdn.com/johnmullinax/archive/2008/06/17/democratizing-dita-dita-exchange-and-danish-beer-20-questions-with-steffen-frederiksen-of-content-technologies.aspx

Steve

Create Your First OBA: Part 3

Steve Fox — Sat, 03 May 2008 00:14:00 GMT

Hey gang,

If you've been following along with the Create Your First OBA series, I've published the first two of the six parts - see below.

I was actually hedging on posting for the third item because I wrote an article for MSDN Magazine that covers it. So, I'll provide you with a link to the article which lives here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc507632.aspx.

I'm on the road again at Sapphire for the next few days, so if you're in Orlando at the conference look me up...I'll be dutifully hanging out at our booth. When I get back, I'll post on SharePoint workflow. As I mentioned in an earlier post, there's been a lot of requests for this so hang tight and I'll get to it soon.

Have a great weekend!

Steve

The OBA Sample Application Kits

Steve Fox — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 23:07:00 GMT

Just a quick post to check out the OBA Sample Application for Kits MSDN page. The kits provide comprehensive guidance on how to integrate Office with SAP and PeopleSoft (and we'll have others in the future). The kits include whitepaper, install guide, technical walkthrough doc, and source code. We announced the latest of the kits (the OBA Sample Application Kit for PeopleSoft) last week at Kurt DelBene's keynote at Collaborate 08.

You can get to the page here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/cc442491.aspx

From this page, you can get to the individual kits.

Check it out! This is awesome stuff, and it is a rarity to find kits that provide guidance against these two very popular LOB Systems (that is PeopleSoft and SAP).

Cheers,

Steve

Conference Follow-Up Post

Steve Fox — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 22:41:00 GMT

Over the past few weeks, I've attended and presented at a number of conferences (specifically VSLive, MS CSAF, Collaborate, and DevConnections) and had some great conversations with attendees who were seeking more information or had questions in the sessions on additional OBA resources. During some of these conversations, I promised to follow up in my blog on some specific issues/questions. In this blog post, I've added some additional information on:

Deployment
SharePoint Workflow
Outlook add-in development

I'll also be following up on this post in the future with additional information, so I encourage you to check back or RSS the blog (as I'm not exactly to a schedule when posting).

Deployment

In a couple of my sessions, we had some detailed conversations around deployment. Here is a question that I was going to check on. I've also added some additional information that you can check out.

1. Can you point to the root folder assembly and have it point to the latest version of the bits? (This was in relation to mapping a content type from SharePoint and then invoking the assembly from the doc library.) The answer to the question, as I suspected, was yes--and that the deployment manifest should point you to the right location. However, the thing I forgot to mention was that you have to make sure that in your deployment properties you have "Check every time the customization runs." Also, this is not the default setting; the default setting is "Check Every 7 Days." So, once you publish a solution with that configuration, each time the custom document is opened you will get the latest version of the assembly associated with that document.

Misha Schneerson, one of the devs on VSTO, has a great multi-part post on Deployment. While we've made it easier in VS 2008 (by virtue of ClickOnce), there are still some things to keep in mind. You can check out his blog here: http://blogs.msdn.com/mshneer/archive/2008/04/24/deploying-your-vsto-add-in-to-all-users-part-iii.aspx.

SharePoint Workflow

Many of you asked me about some additional workflow guidance. I've pinged a couple of different people, and we're going to put together a blog-post with some additional information. I've also requested some web-casts to address some of the basics. I'll post pointers as these become available. Until then, here are a few things to get you started:

1. http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=358685

2. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointdesigner/HA101005911033.aspx

3. http://blogs.msdn.com/nikhil/archive/2007/09/11/vsto-and-sharepoint-workflow.aspx

4. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386168.aspx

I'm also working on a couple of other things (whitepaper and webcast) that I'll try and get out to you soon.

Outlook Add-in Development

I'm noticing more and more developers extending Outlook. In one of my sessions, we talked a little about deployment across 2003 and 2007 instances of Outlook and we also discussed migration of OFS form regions to managed code OFRs. Here is some additional information for you guys on this:

Outlook 2007 should host an Outlook 2003 add-in. Mary Lee recently wrote a blog post about developing and testing an Outlook 2003 add-in on a computer running Outlook 2007. You can read more at this post - http://blogs.msdn.com/vsto/archive/2008/03/20/developing-an-add-in-for-multiple-versions-of-office.aspx.

Note that the deployment method isn't Office version specific; it's VSTO runtime specific. A VSTO solution that works for both O11 and O12 must be designed with the VSTO 2.0 runtime and .NET FX 2.0, so the same setup project with CASPOL deployment would apply.

There is also an interesting topic named "Creating Solutions for Multiple Versions of Office" at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb772080.aspx.

We do have topics that discuss how to import an OFS into an Outlook 2007 project. We also discuss the advantages and disadvantages of importing a form region vs. creating one fresh by using our designer. I will admit that the discussion of using an OFS file is not overly extensive. However, I don't think we missed any discussion critical to who are considering the idea of moving their OFS files to VSTO. Here are the topics that discuss using an OFS file:

· Creating Outlook Form Regions - http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386301.aspx.

· Walkthrough: Importing a Form Region that was Designed in Outlook - http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb608611.aspx.

· Accessing a Form Region at Run Time - http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb772084.aspx.

Note: Thanks to the VSTO dev team and UE team for providing responses to my field notes and queries.

To those of you who attended my sessions and had questions, I hope the above at least gets you started. If not, I'll be sure to post more in the coming days and weeks.

Steve

Create Your First OBA: Part 1

Steve Fox — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 03:07:00 GMT

Last week I attended VSLive and promised to post some of the sample code (I emphasize demo code J) I discussed at the conference. Specifically, in the couple of sessions that I did I discussed SharePoint integration with Word (showing a lightweight OBA) and the creation of Outlook add-ins using Visual Studio 2008 (VSTO 3.0). In an earlier post, I showed you how to create an Outlook add-in and integrate with external data using a custom task pane. I also showed you how to create an Outlook Form Region. I also published an article on this in the most recent MSDN magazine http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc164242.aspx.

So, I’m going to focus on the OBA side of things through six posts, which I’ll break out as follows:

The Lightweight OBA scenario is essentially an annual review process that uses a custom task pane to load employee data and then map it to a set of Word content controls in the document. The data comes from a SQL server and can be updated from the custom task pane as well. Further, the document is tied to a SharePoint content type and has some workflow associated with it. (I currently have some oob workflow associated with it, but I’ll create some custom workflow in the next couple of weeks and associate that with the document-level solution). To make things a little easier to get started, I’ve posted my VSLive deck to this post so you can walk through the deck…I’ve included screenshots with the deck so you can get a sense for what my demo looked like. Note that it is a work in progress!

So, since this is the first of these five posts I’ll cover the creation of the VSTO document-level customization. Alright, here goes:

The first thing you’ll want to do is to make sure you have an employee database (keep it simple with a table) with some records in it. In my solution, I have a few records each with an employee name, ID, title, and review scores for three years. I’ve also got some fields for the comments and ratings that you’ll use when uploading the comments. Take a look at the screenshots in the attached deck to get a sense for what fields I’ve created in the SQL Server table.

After you’ve got your table created, you’ll want to now go ahead and create your VSTO project. Note that when creating a document-level solution you can either create a document and then use that as the document in your development project or you can create and edit a blank document in the VS IDE. Depending on how complex you want your template to be, you can do either…but if you’re looking to build a complex template/document, I’d consider building it first and then using it in the project. Okay, open Visual Studio 2008, click File, New, Project, and then select either Visual C# or Visual Basic, Office, and Word 2007 Document. When prompted, select whether you want to use an existing document (if you created one here’s where you would browse to it) or not (in which case you would create/edit the document in VS).

With your VSTO document-level solution created, you’ll want first add the data source (the employee table you created) to your project. To do this, click Data, Add New Data Source, select your SQL server instance, and the database within which the employee table resides.

After you’ve got your data added, you’ll now want to add a user control that will host a data view. Right click your project, click Add, User Control, and give it a name. The designer view will open by default, and you can drag over the fields that you want to load from the SQL server table (mine was called employee) onto the designer, which will automatically create a data view for you. In my custom task pane, I also created a bottom part to the custom task pane (see slide 13 for the entire custom task pane) which I mapped to the data that the manager would enter in as rating data for the annual review process. For each of the custom task pane sections I had a button which had a load event (took the currently selected data and added it to the document) and a Sync button (which mapped the completed fields in the document to the fields in the custom task pane). You could then subsequently save the data using the data view back into SQL server.

Okay, you should now have the data source added to your project and the user control created. The next thing you’ll want to do is customize the Word document. In my document, I opened the Word document in the designer view and then dragged a few content controls from the Word Controls part of the Toolbox and create a document that could then house some external data (see slide 21).

After you’ve done all of this, we now need to do a couple of things to finish Part One: 1) add some code to load an instance of the user control into a custom task pane when the assembly is loaded by the host application and 2) add some mapping code between the data from the custom task pane to and from the document.

1) The code for adding the user control to the custom task pane will be added to the core ThisDocument.cs file:

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Data;

using System.Linq;

using System.Text;

using System.Windows.Forms;

using System.Xml.Linq;

using Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Applications.Runtime;

using Office = Microsoft.Office.Core;

using Word = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word;

namespace _2008AnnualReview

{

public partial class ThisDocument

{

private AnnualReviewTaskPane ctrl = new AnnualReviewTaskPane();

private void ThisDocument_Startup(object sender, System.EventArgs e)

{

this.ActionsPane.Controls.Add(ctrl);

}

private void ThisDocument_Shutdown(object sender, System.EventArgs e)

{

}

…

}

2) Mapping code between custom task pane and Word document.

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.ComponentModel;

using System.Drawing;

using System.Data;

using System.Linq;

using System.Text;

using System.Windows.Forms;

namespace _2008AnnualReview

{

public partial class AnnualReviewTaskPane : UserControl

{

string empName;

string empNumber;

string empTitle;

string empReviewScore06;

string empReviewScore07;

string strWorkEthic;

string strLeadership;

string strProdKnowledge;

string strSkillsDev;

string strPromotion;

string str2008ReviewScore;

string strAdditionalComments;

string strDate;

string strSignature;

public AnnualReviewTaskPane()

{

InitializeComponent();

}

private void employeeReviewBindingNavigatorSaveItem_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

this.Validate();

this.employeeReviewBindingSource.EndEdit();

//You’ll want to add some more sophisticated error-handling code here.

try

{

this.tableAdapterManager.UpdateAll(this.annualReviewDataSet);

MessageBox.Show("Records Updated.");

}

catch (Exception exceptError)

{

MessageBox.Show(exceptError.ToString());

}

private void AnnualReviewTaskPane_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

employeeReviewTableAdapter.Fill(this.annualReviewDataSet.EmployeeReview);

}

private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

mapTextboxData();

mapContentControls();

}

private void mapTextboxData()

{

empName = employee_NameTextBox.Text;

empNumber = employee_NumTextBox.Text;

empTitle = employee_TitleTextBox.Text;

empReviewScore06 = review_Score_06TextBox.Text;

empReviewScore07 = review_Score_07TextBox.Text;

}

private void mapContentControls()

{

Globals.ThisDocument.wccName.Text = empName;

Globals.ThisDocument.wccEmpNumber.Text = empNumber;

Globals.ThisDocument.wccTitle.Text = empTitle;

Globals.ThisDocument.wcc2006ReviewScore.Text = empReviewScore06;

Globals.ThisDocument.wcc2007ReviewScore.Text = empReviewScore07;

}

private void button3_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

//You can definitely optimize this for one string mapping as opposed to a //two step process.

strWorkEthic = Globals.ThisDocument.ddlistWorkEthic.Text;

strLeadership = Globals.ThisDocument.ddlistLeadership.Text;

strProdKnowledge = Globals.ThisDocument.ddlistProdknowledge.Text;

strSkillsDev = Globals.ThisDocument.ddlistSkillsDev.Text;

strPromotion = Globals.ThisDocument.ddlistPromotion.Text;

str2008ReviewScore = Globals.ThisDocument.ddlist2008ReviewScore.Text;

strAdditionalComments = Globals.ThisDocument.wccAdditionalComments.Text;

strDate = Globals.ThisDocument.wccSignatureDate.Text;

strSignature = Globals.ThisDocument.wccManagerSignature.Text;

work_EthicTextBox.Text = strWorkEthic;

leadershipTextBox.Text = strLeadership;

prod_KnowledgeTextBox.Text = strProdKnowledge;

tech_SkillsTextBox.Text = strSkillsDev;

promotionTextBox.Text = strPromotion;

review_CommentsTextBox.Text = strAdditionalComments;

review_Score_08TextBox.Text = str2008ReviewScore;

}

…

}

Note: Where you see “…” I’ve not included this as this is auto-generated code.

So, at this point you should have a VSTO document-level solution that does the following:

1.       Loads data into a custom task pane.
2.       Enables the user to browse the data.
3.       Load the employee data into the Word document.
4.       The Word document enables you to add ratings.
5.      Sync the ratings with the custom task pane.
6.       Save the employee’s annual review data to the SQL server.

In the next post, I’ll discuss deployment.

Have fun coding!

Steve

Your Second Outlook Add-in

Steve Fox — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:52:00 GMT

In my previous post, I showed you how to create a custom task pane that hosted a user control data bound to an external data source. The control enabled you to browse data and then create a sales contact with the currently selected record. Vaguely interesting, yes, but more to the point we successfully extended Outlook and then manipulated and changed an Outlook item based on external data that we were browsing. In this post, I've added a small snippet to get you started on creating an Outlook form region (OFR).

OFRs are great; they allow you to extend your Outlook experience with customized forms that integrated into the various inspectors or forms within Outlook. For example, I could create a custom OFR for a mail message that is dynamically bound to my email properties or I could create a custom OFR for my sales contacts that looks up their address and maps their address for us on the OFR. In this blog post, I'll walk you through a simple OFR and then point you to some additional information that may be helpful for your more extensive OFR development.

OFRs are an artefact of Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) 3.0, which is a component technology within Visual Studio 3.0 that enables you to create Office solutions. To create an OFR, open Visual Studio 2008 and click File, New, Project, and then select the Office node under either Visual C# or Visual Basic. Once you've got your project set up, right-click the Project and click Add New. In the Add New dialog, select Office and then select Outlook Form Region. Provide your OFR with a name and click Add. This kicks off a wizard that walks through the OFR creation process. You can either create a new OFR or import an existing one. Note that you have a number of choices here: i) Adjoining, ii) Separate, iii) Replacement, or iv) Replace All (see the article below for more information on these). Select Separate and click Next.Give your OFR a name and leave the two check-boxes checked.Click Next and then select Mail Message and then click Finish. This will set up and add your OFR to your project.

The OFR will have a couple of critical methods you'll want to pay attention to (double-click the OFR designer to see these methods):

[C#]

private void Demo_FormRegionShowing(object sender, System.EventArgs e)

{

}

private void Demo_FormRegionClosed(object sender, System.EventArgs e)

{

}

[VB]

Private Sub FormRegion1_FormRegionShowing(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.FormRegionShowing

End Sub

Private Sub FormRegion1_FormRegionClosed(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.FormRegionClosed

End Sub

These methods are, similar to other VSTO project shell methods, methods that allow you write constructor and clean-up code for your OFR when it shows and when it is closed. If you go back to the designer view, you can add controls to your OFR. Go ahead and add a combo-box, a label, a button and a web-browser control. In my project, I added "Stocks:" as the label text, added the text "Go" to the button, set the Name property of the button to Go, set the combo-box Name property to cmboStock, and then added five items to the combo-box collection: i) V, ii) MSFT, iii) GOOG, iv) GE, and v) CSCO. You'll want to size the web browser as 1000 x 900. I also changed the Name property of the web-browser control to stockBrowser.

The heavy-lifting, or not so heavy-lifting, is done by our button. You will want to add an event off of the button and then load the page in the web browser based on the user's selection. This is the code that you'll hang off of the button:

[C#]

private void Go_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

string strMsnURL = "http://moneycentral.msn.com/detail/stock_quote?Symbol=";

string strStock = cmboStock.SelectedItem.ToString();

string fullStockURL;

fullStockURL = strMsnURL + strStock;

stockBrowser.Navigate(fullStockURL);

}

[VB]

Private Sub Go_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Go.Click

Dim strMsnURL As String

Dim strStock As String

Dim fullStockURL As String

strMsnURL = "http://moneycentral.msn.com/detail/stock_quote?Symbol="

strStock = cmboStock.SelectedItem.ToString

fullStockURL = strMsnURL + strStock

stockBrowser.Navigate(fullStockURL)

End Sub

Once you've done this, you're done with the coding part of the sample. You can hit F5 and build your project.

I like the Separate OFR because it creates a button that enables you to toggle back and forth across default and custom inspector views. And for the above sample, if you create a new mail message you should see a button on your ribbon (name of your OFR), which you can click to view the OFR (see the attached image).

In general, OFRs are pretty exciting because you can host Windows Forms or WPF user controls and of course OFRs (and more widely VSTO) supports LINQ, WF, WCF, etc. This was a simple one to get you started, but you can check out the VSTO Developer Center for more information. Also, I recently published an article with MSDN magazine that provides a more in-depth walkthrough of a custom OFR (this one walks through a Replacement OFR). You can find these links as follows:

1. VSTO Developer Center: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa905533.aspx.

2. MSDN Magazine Article: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc164242.aspx.

Also, as I mentioned in an earlier blog entry the MSPress book Programming Applications for Office Outlook 2007 is a good book for learning about all things Outlook.

Have a great day!

Steve

Integrate Office with SAP...

Steve Fox — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:17:00 GMT

You may have heard of Duet, an out of the box OBA that supports a number of different scenarios for the enterprise (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/duet/FX101686211033.aspx?ofcresset=1). Duet is a great solution and covers a wide variety of scenarios. If you're looking to hook the Office system into SAP programmatically on a smaller scale, though, what do you do? You have a couple of options depending on what you're trying to integrate with. Assuming you've got your Web services created, you can either hook into the Office client using Visual Studio and you can integrate with MOSS using either the iView Web part, the Business Data Catalog (BDC), or through PerformancePoint Server. If you're looking to integrate with the client or through the BDC, I've posted some guidance that may be able to help you. I developed this in partnership with Softagon, an IT firm based out of San Francisco, and have delivered this guidance in the form of a 'kit' -- more precisely an OBA Sample Application Kit for SAP (v. 2.0). The kit includes a whitepaper, install guide, technical overview, and some source code to get you started. The only bummer is that you'll need to recreate the SAP environment. But once you do that, you can recreate the solution around which the kit was built (a specialty travel package application).

You can find the kit here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/obasapsak. The kit shows you how to integrate SAP Web services with Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007 and MOSS 2007 using Visual Studio 2008 (specifically Visual Studio Tools for Office 3.0).

If you're looking for guidance for earlier versions of Visual Studio, I've also released the OBA Sample Application Kit for SAP, v. 1.0. You can find that here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb498189.aspx. This shows you how to integrate SAP Web services with Excel and PowerPoint 2007 using VSTO 2005 SE.

More kits will come in the future, so check back for more information or go to the OBA Developer Portal: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa905528.aspx.

Steve

Your First Outlook Add-in...

Steve Fox — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 21:47:00 GMT

I just finished a private technical briefing and during the session showed a few demos. Many of the attendees asked me to share the code, so I thought I'd post to my blog to get my butt in gear and actually post some useful stuff and get the code up here so the attendees could read up on it.

When thinking about OBAs, one of the key integration points in Office is Outlook. It makes sense; a ton of people use this tool every day, so why wouldn't you leverage the Outlook OM and VSTO to create some killer OBAs? To get you started, I put together a small demo that shows how you integrate Outlook with AdventureWorks using VSTO. The demo shows i) how to add a custom task pane that's bound to data and enables you to create a new contact (or more widely access the Outlook OM).

First, the environment. My dev environment is Windows Server 2003, MOSS 2007 (which I won't use in this demo), VS 2008 (which includes VSTO 3.0), Expression Blend, SQL Server 2005, and Office Enterprise 2007. I've also downloaded the Adventureworks 2005 sample db off of Codeplex.

To begin, open Visual Studio and create a new project (File, New, Project, click Visual C# (or Visual Basic), Office, and then select Outlook Add-in). Name the project what you want and click OK. This creates the VSTO Outlook project shell for you.

In my project, I first added the Adventureworks database (Data, Add New Data Source, and walk through the wizard to add the database). The only table you'll want to add to the project is the vSalesPerson table. Once the database is added, click Data, Show Data Sources to make sure it's there.

I then added a new user control (right click project, click Add, New Item, and then select User Control in the New Item dialog). Resize the control to be about 300 x 760. I then dragged a few of the fields from the Data view onto the user control--specifically, I added FirstName, Lastname, Phone, Email, AddressLine1, and City. You can select the ones you want; just remember you'll need to account for them in your code-behind. Once you've done this, add a button to the user control (see attached image).

I added some code-behind to the button, which is listed below:

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.ComponentModel;

using System.Drawing;

using System.Data;

using System.Linq;

using System.Text;

using System.Windows.Forms;

using Outlook = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook;

namespace MyTestAddin

{

public partial class CustomerBrowser : UserControl

{

string strFirstName;

string strLastName;

string strPhone;

string strEmail;

string strAddress;

string strCity;

public CustomerBrowser()

{

InitializeComponent();

}

private void CustomerBrowser_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

vSalesPersonTableAdapter.Fill(this.adventureWorks_DataDataSet.vSalesPerson);

}

private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

strFirstName = firstNameTextBox.Text;

strLastName = lastNameTextBox.Text;

strPhone = phoneTextBox.Text;

strEmail = emailAddressTextBox.Text;

strAddress = addressLine1TextBox.Text;

strCity = cityTextBox.Text;

createCustomerContact(

strFirstName,

strLastName,

strPhone,

strEmail,

strAddress,

strCity);

}

private void createCustomerContact(

string firstName,

string lastname,

string phone,

string email,

string address,

string city)

{

Outlook._Application myOutlookObject = new Outlook.Application();

Outlook.MAPIFolder custContacts = (Outlook.MAPIFolder)myOutlookObject.Session.GetDefaultFolder(Outlook.OlDefaultFolders.olFolderContacts);

Outlook.ContactItem newSalesContact = (Outlook.ContactItem)custContacts.Items.Add(Outlook.OlItemType.olContactItem);

newSalesContact.FirstName = firstName;

newSalesContact.LastName = lastname;

newSalesContact.Business2TelephoneNumber = phone;

newSalesContact.Email1Address = email;

newSalesContact.BusinessAddress = address;

newSalesContact.BusinessAddressCity = city;

newSalesContact.Save();

}

You'll note that you need to call the FIll method when the user controls loads to ensure the data from the Adventureworks database loads. But, most of the other data is pretty self-explanatory. You're essentially grabbing the string variables and then mapping them to the properties of the new contact item you've created. You need to note that there is no error handling in this code, though. So, for example I could add the same person from the data source over and over again. You may not want to do that.

Hit F6 to build, but don't run just yet. After you've successfully built the app, go to the ThisAddIn class and make sure you have the following code in it:

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Linq;

using System.Text;

using System.Xml.Linq;

using Outlook = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook;

using Office = Microsoft.Office.Core;

namespace MyTestAddin

{

public partial class ThisAddIn

{

Microsoft.Office.Tools.CustomTaskPane ctp;

private CustomerBrowser ctrl = new CustomerBrowser();

string title = "Demo";

private void ThisAddIn_Startup(object sender, System.EventArgs e)

{

ctp = this.CustomTaskPanes.Add(ctrl, title);

ctp.Visible = true;

ctp.Width = 350;

ctp.DockPosition = Microsoft.Office.Core.MsoCTPDockPosition.msoCTPDockPositionRight;

}

private void ThisAddIn_Shutdown(object sender, System.EventArgs e)

{

}

#region VSTO generated code

/// <summary>

/// Required method for Designer support - do not modify

/// the contents of this method with the code editor.

/// </summary>

private void InternalStartup()

{

this.Startup += new System.EventHandler(ThisAddIn_Startup);

this.Shutdown += new System.EventHandler(ThisAddIn_Shutdown);

}

#endregion

}

The important code here is that you need to create a custom task pane object (CTP) and then add an instance of the newly created user control to the CTP object and then set some properties on the CTP object. What this will do (notice that we've added some of the code in the ThisAddinStartup method) is invoke the custom task pane.

You can now F5 to build. You should see the user control on the right-hand side of the screen. Open your Contacts folder, and then browse to a sales person from the Adventureworks db and click the button to add them to your Contacts. Voila! You've created your first Outlook add-in.

The extrapolation for an OBA is connecting to a LOB system via a service. You can try and wrap the Adventureworks db in a service and do the same thing we did above--just do it through a service call--and you'd have built a small OBA.

Well, happy coding!

Steve

PS I recently picked up the book Programming Applications for Office Outlook 2007, and this helped me with some questions I had about coding against the Outlook OM. Lots of code samples in it, and very well written.

The ramblings continue...starting out on OBA

Steve Fox — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:34:00 GMT

It's been a while since I've blogged last, and things have been very busy. Over the past three months, I've been to a number of conferences including the most recent Office Developer Conference and SharePoint Conference. It was great to see more OBA-centric content at these events. Coming up, I'll also be hitting VSLive, DevConnections, Collaborate, TechEd, SAP TechEd, Oracle OpenWorld, and PDC. And at these events, you're going to see some additional OBA content that will help you get on your way.

To start though, I'd like to offer those who are new to OBA some key resources...the things you might take a look at if you're a developer not necessarily new to .NET, but new to developing Office solutions.So, in this blog I'm going to list out a few places you might go to get more information.

OBA Overview: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb614538.aspx. This is a good article (chapter excerpt actually) to get your hands dirty.
OBA Central: www.obacentral.com. A decent portal for partner and customer OBA information. I've worked with some of the companies on here, and it's always great to see companies highlighted and on OBA Central.
Office Developer Center: http://r.office.microsoft.com/r/rlidOfficeDeveloperCenter?clid=th-TH. This is a good place to go for general Office development information. There are a ton of decent How-to videos you can find here (which I think are one of the quickest ways to get yourself up to speed on very specific areas of development).
VSTO Developer Center: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa905533.aspx. VSTO is key to developing the client-side portion of OBAs (as well as doing some server-side stuff such as SharePoint workflow). It's come a long way, so I encourage you to check it out (VSTO 3.0 is the most current version).
SharePoint (WSS) Developer Center: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/default.aspx. This is Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), the underlying infrstructure and object model for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. WSS is great for those of you who want to get into understanding the object model and dynamic creation of sites, lists, etc.
SharePoint (MOSS) Developer Cetner: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa905503.aspx. This is the MOSS portal, where you can find lots of great information. There are a number of key features you'll want to learn about when beginning to build OBAs. For example, you'll want to understand how to build Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Excel Services, Business Data Catalog (BDC) Web parts to build integration into your line-of-business systems and provide business intelligence into your MOSS-based solutions.
OBA Solution Patterns: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb614541.aspx. OBA solution patterns provide some guidance to architects and developers on design patterns. We have some ways to on these, but they're a great step towards guiding you on how to craft your solution after an existing pattern.
OBA RAPs: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/bb643797.aspx. This is the link to one OBA Reference Architecture Pack (RAP), which is a great way to learn about industry-specific OBAs. Mike has created a number of other ones, so make sure you check those out as well.
Six Office Business Applications for Office SharePoint Server (MS Press): http://www.microsoft.com/MSPress/books/9471.aspx. A book that provides an overview of six different OBAs and how developers could go about building them.
Programming Office Business Applications (MS Press): http://www.microsoft.com/MSPress/books/12194.aspx. A book that looks at the different technologies that makie up an OBA--ranging from business intelligence, to social networking, to OpenXML, to SharePoint Workflow. Again, a developer-focused book.

In future blogs, I'm going to walk through some specifics about OBAs and try and cover them from top-to-bottom. I'll also try and find some additional things that you might find useful in your OBA ramp-up.

Until then (which I promise will not be too long), happy reading, coding.

Steve

The ramblings begin...

Steve Fox — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 03:07:00 GMT

Well it's December 13th, and I have not really started my Holiday shopping yet...how sad is that. But alas, I'm sure you're not tuning into this blog to hear about the lameness of my shopping habits, but you're probably looking for a little info on this mysterious thing called OBA. And if you have, then great...because I'll be using this blog to update you regularly on all things OBA. And while the title of the blog implies perambulation, fear not; I'll try and be somewhat structured in my delivery of information to you as I find it or create it.

In this blog entry, all I'm going to do is define OBA to keep things simple. As this blog grows, I'll add more information, sample code, and pointers to great content so you can fulfill your quest to learn, build and deploy OBAs in your organization. So, without further delay: What is OBA?

OBA, which stands for Office Business Application, is not a product SKU; moreover, it is the building of composite applications that leverage the Office development platform - or what some are also referring to as the OBA framework. I simplify my definition of OBA to the potential integration of three major components: i) a LOB system that manages your organization's business processes (e.g. SAP, PeopleSoft, Siebel, MS Dynamics, etc.). ii) the customization of the Office client (using tools like VSTO), and iii) the development and/or customization of MOSS 2007. The server side, while predominantly MOSS-centric (MOSS being Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) is not necessarily restricted to SharePoint; however, it is a primary piece of the pie.). And I say potential because you can different flavors of OBAs. For example, I could build an OBA that is Office client customizations tied to a LOB system; another type of OBA is server-side customizations (think MOSS BDC web part) tied to a LOB system; and yet another that combines both client and server customizations and one or more LOB systems. More forward looking, we'll likely see more OBAs that leverage hosted services/mash-ups in the cloud

There are various levels of value from creating OBAs in the organization today. For example, large-scale LOB systems are often cumbersome to learn and use and often don't return the desired investments. This means training costs, change management costs, etc. Thus, OBAs (through leveraging the Office platform) enable developers to integrate LOB systems into the Office client and MOSS and accomplish two primary things: i) keep the information worker in the context of a familiar and comfortable environment, and ii) drive specific disciplinary and/or business data directly into the purview of the people who need and use it. This integration can mitigate some of the aforementioned costs thus decreasing total cost of ownership and driving productivity into the appropriate organizational disciplines.

There is a lot of OBA momentum underway, and you can check out www.obacentral.com to see some of what's happening out there. However, in future blogs I'll be posting lots of useful information, so look out for client customization information, integration techniques with MOSS, and more. Of course, I'll also provide some additional business value information (and pointers to other blogs, articles, etc.) that may also be useful to you.

Until then, I hope you'll find our chats useful and fun!

Steve