Steve Fox's OBA Ramblings : OFR

End-to-End Sales Forecast OBA Released To Web!

Steve Fox — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 05:28:00 GMT

It's been a while, but I wanted to let all you OBA developers out there know of something cool that we recently released, which is the End-to-End (E2E) Sales Forecast OBA. As you know from reading this blog, you know that OBA is an Office Business Application and involves mutltiple technologies within the Office platform. The E2E Sales Forecast OBA is a solution that walks you through a scenario where a salesperson creates and submits a quarterly sales forecast. Using a customized Excel template (built using VS 2008/VSTO), our salesperson has the ability to navigate to the team Sales Forecast portal (SharePoint portal), invoke a custom Excel sales forecast template from the New button (content type mapping to a custom template), load line-of-business sales data into the document (via WPF custom actions pane), generate executive reports for the forecast (via Open XML), and submit the document for approval (through SharePoint workflow). It essentially uses all of the concepts and technologies that I've discussed thus far in this blog--plus a few that I haven't.

In the demo solution (which is available on CodePlex--see link below), the approving manager can interact directly with SharePoint or choose to approve the workflow via a custom Outlook Form Region (built using VS 2008/VSTO). Messaging of the workflow is marshaled by SharePoint, and Open XML enables the solution to parse out the necessary data and attach to workflow and to the custom Outlook from region. This is a great starter solution if you're looking to get your hands on some code, and includes the technologies below:

- SharePoint

- Office Client Ribbon and Action Pane Customizations (VS 2008/VSTO)

- Outlook Custom Form Regions

- Open XML

- Unified Communications (UC)

- SharePoint Workflow

- Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)

- ++

For the community source-code download and accompanying book, you can check out the following resources:

Sales Forecast Codeplex Source Code Site

http://www.codeplex.com/obasales

Sales Forecast Wrox Book Accompaniment

http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470377313.html

The goal of the book is to walk you through all of the code and you would set up and deploy the sales forecast OBA.

Enjoy!!

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

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