Presenting at Office Connections
I'm in Las Vegas this week presenting at the Office Connections conference. So far, the weather in Las Vegas has been perfect - wish I could say the same thing about my luck with gambling. The conference is at Mandalay Bay, which is an absolutely huge facility. Very nice. One of the coolest sessions I attended so far was Scott Guthrie's session on ASP.NET AJAX. You've definitely got to check it out. Get the facts here.
Anyway, I've got 4 sessions on tap:
- Enhancing Excel's Business Intelligence Capabilities using VSTO (updated slides) (Example projects 1 2)
- Going Deep with Excel Services (updated slides)
- Achieving Data/View Separation in Word 2007 (updated slides)
- Using VSTO ServerDocument for seamless offline Experiences (updated slides) (Example projects 1 2)
I'll be posting example code from the sessions in an upcoming post.
One of the things that struck me as I was preparing for this is that it seems kind of weird at these events anymore to make special mention that you're using VSTO or .NET for Office development. I know there are still lots and lots of people doing some development in VBA (myself included), but using VSTO or .NET for Office development seems so mainstream to me these days that mentioning VSTO in a session title seems similar to saying “Enhancing Excel's Business Intelligence Capabilities using VSTO in English”.
The reason I bring this up is the Excel BI session in particular is less about VSTO and more about techniques for enhancing the BI experience. The techniques involve manipulation of Excel using the Excel object model (same as always) and for the most part could be applied no matter what your development tool preference is. The reason I selected VSTO for this is that it allows for easy creation of Smart Tags and super easy access to the task pane. Also, I've gotten so use to working in Visual Studio now that the VBE just feels so ancient.
So, for the people attending the session because you really wanted to know more about VSTO, I apologize. You will learn something about VSTO, but VSTO in this session is just a great means to an end. For what it's worth, you can check out the “Achieving Data/View Separation in Word 2007” session. I use VSTO 2005 SE in that session in one of the demos to create a Word add-in that allows you to view/modify contents of a document's custom XML parts. :)