Give your apps or forms the Office 2007 look and feel

Last night we also discussed how we could make our Add-ins look like Office 2007.
Here are a few links to third party libraries that make this possible.

DotNetBar, SyncFusion and Infragistics. I have not tried out any of them yet, please contact me with your opinion, maybe we can do a show and tell on one or more of them during our next Mossig meeting.

VSTO Details

Last night at the MOSSIG meeting I demo-ed a few VSTO Add-ins I've created recently showing how to expose business data in Word and how to save an email to SharePoint from a context menu in Outlook.
A few questions where about where to download VSTO etc., I came across this MS-page that actually has nice recap of all new stuff for developers.

The seperate VSTORuntime is here. I'll be bLogging a few code samples in the next few days.

Lots more info and updated documentation on the new Office Developer Centre. Be sure to check that out!

Getting Ready for Launch

Update 3/11/2006: Now On-line http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/FX100647101033.aspx?pid=CL100569831033 (no more beta...) Not only looks very cool, but also has lots of new content that get you up to speed with the new version quickly. Don't forget we've got free courses on Office 2007 on the e-learning site. Just search for Office 2007 there and you'll find a whole bunch of free courses that do a good job at introducing you to the new UI and Features.

You can tell we are close to launch date, even the Office On-line Site has a 2007 look and feel: http://officebeta.iponet.net/en-us/sharepointserver/FX100492001033.aspx

While you are there be sure to check out the Additional Resources (Bottom Left on page) with links to (now free!) e-learning courses on Microsoft Office System 2007 for developers and users.

Ready for take off?

According to the Belgians the launch of Office 2007 is November 9th, check out the count-down here:

http://www.moss2007.be/Pages/Default.aspx on this cool SharePoint 2007 Site.

We are having a party at the Crown about a week later.

MOSSIG is still working on organising the next meeting, we are targetting the 15th of November after the event at the Crown but we will be in another location.

VSTO SE Rocks!

Last week I spend three full days submerged in Office 2007 development while attending the 2007 Touchdown training for ISV's in Melbourne. The first day was entirely dedicated to VSTO and the XML file formats. Now that VSTO SE is available you can actually do some really interesting stuff in Word, Excel, Outlook etc.

Eric Carter, one of the authors of the Visual Studio Tools for Office book I highly recommend has posted some interesting examples on his bLog. The last one particularly interesting as one of the students in the room with me last week was looking for info on how to display Item Context menus.

Some good getting started documentation here: http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=5467323 and here http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=5467322 .

If you prefer videos: http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=237144 , http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=237142

Note the following remark on Eric's bLog:

"Also, a small comment on VSTO Second Edition.  Some have assumed that VSTO second edition is a super set of VSTO 2005 as the name kind of implies.  This is not the case.  You will want to have both VSTO and VSTO second edition installed at the same time in most cases.  VSTO has the document projects for Word 2003 and Excel 2003.  VSTO SE adds application add-ins to target Office 2003 and Office 2007.  The two products should be installed together to get both document and application level customizations."

I'll try to bLog about some Sharepoint dev experiences next week, I have been experimenting with generating documents containing sharepoint list data automatically using event handlers and that seems to be a really cool way of using Sharepoint for data collection (using Infopath) and reporting.

 

MOSSIG Meeting Wednesday the 23rd

The meeting next week (the usual 5:30 at Como plaza) is going to be an informal one, totally devoted to show and tell by the members, Q&A on Office development and Office 2007 features and lots of networking. We will not have formal presentations this time around because the meeting overlaps with Tech-Ed Australia and most of the presenters and organisers will not be there.
I am going to be at the meeting however and we have some members that will introduce themselves and show and tell about the solutions they are using or have developed.

For september and october we already have a full schedule with a show and tell session, a business oriented session and a developer session, stay tuned for the official agenda.

Ed

Document generation on servers, with data from any source

Erika Ehrli, the site manager for the Office Developer Centre posted two great new posts with code samples on how to quickly generate Word 2007 Documents using content controls and xml-data. Worth checking out!