Charles Maxson

The Learning Cliff

I mentioned a post or so ago about ?technical complexity? being a factor in IBF solutions. When I got started with IBF, I referred to its ?learning curve? as ?The Learning Cliff? ? often because I found myself ?looking over the edge? (and wanting to jump). Now I was a (painfully) early adopter and learning on a moving code base is never easy (or sane). So you will be pleased to know it has gotten a lot better as the product has solidified. But still, you have to be prepare to dig in around what is probably the broadest technology set ever released at Office development.

In all due respect, if you are a typical Office\VBA developer expecting to wrap you hands around IBF in a long weekend, umm... not so fast. Be prepared to let IBF take you in more places than even most enterprise developers have ever gone...

Here?s the laundry list of the ?Getting Started? prerequisites:

A thorough working knowledge of XML technologies:

I am not even going to mention Authorization Manager, IIS 6, and Windows Server 2003.

And you have to have a solid working knowledge of all the above before you tackle the IBF declarative solution metadata and the Metadata Designer tool. Meaning you will also have to become intimate with some of the essential IBF metadata elements starting with Metadata Scopes, Entities, Views, View Locators, Menu Item Definitions, Actions, Relationships, Ports, Operations, Transformations, and of course Schemas. I even left some out because you get the point by now... IBF is has a learning cliff ? a pretty legitimate one.

Most developers don't have all those skills I listed. I know I cleary am not a master of them all so be prepared to expand your mind if IBF is in your future. But also note the ?Cliff? can be climbed (or avoided depending on how you look at it). But before you go promising to roll out that IBF solution... expect to take a few solid weeks ?looking over the edge?...