MS Office Developer Conference Observations
The first ever Microsoft Office Developer Conference was an excellent event. I spoke with many attendees throughout the event and nearly all of them were pleased with the event and the quality of the sessions. Here are a few of my observations and comments.
Cheers to Office Zealot blogger Matt Hessinger. He led a session on the code snippet capabilities of VSTO 2005 and the utilities his firm used to develop a library of snippets for Microsoft. He did an awesome job, especially considering that he was the opening act before Bill Gate's keynote. Needless to say, he had quite an audience present.
Also, cheers to Office Zealot's own Charles Maxson. He (with an assist from Chris Kunicki) was the developer behind what was arguably the most impressive demo of the conference. He demoed a solution using VSTO 2005 that drew lots of oohs and ahhs from the audience despite the fact that the demo was interrupted by several technical glitches associated with the computer he was given to do the demo. After switching to a different computer however, all was well.
The theme of the conference was that the Office 2003 System is packed with a lot of capability. Much of this capability is wasted if we, as developers, don't build solutions utilizing it. Richard McAniff and Bill Gates in separate keynotes highlighted the tenets of Office development:
a. XML at the core
b. Interop through web services
c. SharePoint services as the foundation
d. High developer productivity
e. Leverage the MS platform
Another theme of the conference was to demonstrate the impressive capabilities of VSTO 2005. I was truly impressed at the potential of VSTO. If you have done any development with smart documents, you can kiss that awkward programming model good bye with VSTO 2005. With VSTO 2005, leveraging the new GUI capabilities afforded by the Document Task Pane is a piece of cake.
If you get a chance to see John Durant in action, by all means, don't miss it. He was head and shoulders above the rest in terms of presentation abilities.
I sat in the front row, directly in front of Mr. Gates during his keynote. I am a huge fan of his, so this was a special treat. I'd seen him give keynotes before, but never this close up. His opening bit that poked fun at the recent doodle episode was especially amusing. While the speech was fine, I found it more interesting to observe his ad-hoc abilities during the Q&A with Steven Sinofsky. What was impressive was how on top of every thing he was. Most of the time people hadn't even gotten half way through their question and he was already grinning or looking knowingly at Steve as if rehashing a design detail that they'd already discussed many times before.
All in all it was a very useful conference that I'm glad I took the time to attend.