How to learn to love a Customized document

windrago — Fri, 06 Aug 2004 21:39:00 GMT

                                 The Complete Guide of:
                       Learn how to love a Customized document
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     Table of contents:
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     A. Purpose of the guide
     B. The first meeting
     C. Phase I.   - "I build you"
     D. Phase II. - The code body language
     E. Phase III. - Actually doing it with View controls
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    A. Purpose of this guide.
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      Firstly, this isn't a joke guide but a very serious topic (hiihihi). All the methods described here are working, and with not too much difficulty.

      Don't expect that you will be able to love a customized document in one week. Not with this guide anyway. If you have the time, patience, and some manners, you will succeed.

      I don't pretend to be a big expert in Office Documents; I'm not. But after some experience with them, I can provide you with some information that can help you, with the first moves between his [runtime] and her [server class] business.

      I will happily update this guide and improve it, with your help of course. Please send me comments and to help make it better.

Dedicated to Brent, who helped me to compile it without even knowing it...

    B. The first meets
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I believe you have an Office System suite installed you can experiment with. If you don't, buy one. For our purposes, every mid-looking box will suffice. Every one can own an Office Professional suite, especially if you are an MSDN subscriber, but this is not the time and place to explain how to get one. (maybe in the next "completed guide of...").
If you don't have an Office System yet, at least try to achieve a meet with one, legally!.

Just in case, if you have installed WordStar, or my God... StarOffice, remove it immediately! You have to see the un-customized document as a nice girl that anybody would love to make a family with. So said, if you want to continue seeing this document [her] you have to remember the following:

    * Let her talk. If she has a lot to say - just listen. Make sure the Microsoft Office Speech package is installed and the headset is working properly.
      A node with the head and some leading questions will do.

    * If she is permanently silent [because there is no code behind], you can try following some of these tips before starting to customize her.

Ask about:
           - herself (do you like the databinding, etc?.)
           - features (although it seems to be boring, you can talk for hours on this subject)
           - her design preferences (If she mentions an aspect that you dislike, don't show it to her and his PM. Just hide it.)
           - tell her about yourself (what a cool developer you are with VSTO 2.0)
           - ask her if she knows how to bind a range to an object through the VS wizard.
           - and the most important: don't answer with yes or no to any message-boxes. Those above are chat-compile-stoppers.

Expand you code-speech.
        - tell her jokes
        - remember to have a lot of humor - Office documents like it.
        - very important : don't be serious.[Like me now ihihihi]
        - Mind your manners: don't hit Menu>Build rudely nor curse.
        - smile : release the tense and make the code healthy.

        If all the above fails, and you can't find a common language [runtime] with her, you probably won't keep with her a long time on that environment. Typically you have installed the wrong Office version or the PIA's are missing. You're such a young boy.... In this case let me introduce all the necessary steps in order to be successful.

    * What to do the first time
       Tell her that you have a nice VS home [Visual Studio] and maybe you can share some good data coming directly from the SQL Server land. That's the moment where the love begins. File, New, Office Document, use an existing document and hit finish.

to be continued...

Mario Esposito @ uncle Bill's house : Coding stories

How to learn to love a Customized document