FEEL the PAIN: Task Panes, Action Panes, Smart Documents, and Sig Weber

I met Sig a few years back while speaking at TechEd Europe (Amsterdam 1999). At that point Sig was an Outlook, CDO & Exchange guru. Today he is still the guru but has expanded his interest into SharePoint. Recently he has had some great posts about what he'd like to see in the Office 12 timeframe for Outlook. Check his blog out.

Sig goes on a rant about task panes in Office:

Now, Outlook 2003 has Task Pane integration to some extend like for the Document and Meeting Workspace integration when you attach a file or create a new appointment. But that's pretty much it (except of the help system). Not only does a solution architect not has the possibility to programmatically work with Outlook Task Panes like you can do in Word, Excel, InfoPath etc. but also there are plenty of opportunities where the concept of Task Panes could be used to improve productivity and usability. Just think about the ugly small fixed sized Rules and Alerts dialog Outlook 2003 uses, or the dialog to manage and create views. Yikes!

I've been begging Microsoft since Office XP alpha 1 to make the task pane programmable. For about the first two years I always got the blank stare followed with the standard "Tell me what scenario you would use that in?" I always respond: well why do you need it? Isn't it obvious that if its a critical UI element for them that developers would want to leverage it. It must be my dense programmer brain, because apparently its not.

Today we have a few options (though still too limited). provides a programmable task pane for Outlook, Word & Excel. Their approach is amazingly flexible but requires using their infrastructure. This isn't a hard thing, but can be too much for simple one off document solution.

Enter Visual Studio Tools for Office 2.0. VSTO 2, not yet released to mere mortals but demonstrated at a number of conferences this year, shows that VSTO 2 makes programming task panes painless. Here is the VSTO 2 recipe:

VSTO 2 Task Pane Soup
First create a user control (or use a built in one) and add a dash of personal creativity. With just a few lines of code, you can sprinkle your user control onto an action pane. Compile, test, deploy and serve hot out of the oven.

So as you can probably tell I'm a VSTO 2 fan. However, one criticism I hear repeatidly and understand is "Does VSTO 2 go far enough?" I think a lot of people are disappointed to find out VSTO 2 is limited to Word & Excel development. Add on top of that a few requirements: (1) You'll need to deploy Whidbey. (2) They need to have Office 2003 professional or Word 2003 and/or Excel 2003 standalone. Yep... it won't work with Student and Teacher Edition 2003 , small business edition, standard edition.

My mom uses standard edition: Sorry mom, you'll never get to see one of my creative works on your desktop.

Some of my friends are in school and use student edition: To them I say "Sorry young uneducated minds, your universe must remain confined and limited. If only you could know the sweet bliss of Pro or stand-alone."

I agree with Sig. A programmable task pane in Outlook is killer.