TechEd Day 5
A quiet start to the day. No dirigible fun. Then two splendid new Office programmability tools presented on the same day (more below)!
First, I spent the morning in the BPR Cabana answering questions about Office Developer Technologies and Tools. These 'Ask the Expert' slots are very good for meeting people with immediate issues, and talking through options and strategies. Be good to have a little more coverage - for some people, this is their opportunity to really nail an expert with an issue they have, so we should make sure there are enough experts, covering enough different tools/products all the time if possible. These sessions have a lot in common with what I do every day in as a consultant. The difference being that here at TechEd you don't have to pay for my time.
Next, Susan Warren of Vertigo introduced the new Vertigo Managed Smart Document Wrapper tool. This is a Visual Studio wizard and a library of classes. It wraps the ISmartDocument interface and exposes it in a sensible object-oriented manner. This approach of providing a standard extensible implementation of ISmartDocument is essentially the same model as VSTO. The Vertigo tool offers a pseudo-event driven model, with PreRender and Action handlers. The PreRender is used to set the appearance or content of a control, and the Action is invoked when the user uses the control. You manage the task pane controls through a simple XML configuration file. Susan kindly allowed me to evaluate this tool in a pre-release form earlier this year, and I've been using it ever since. Anyone who has ever built SmartDocs knows how laborious, repetitive and error-prone it can be. The Vertigo tool really does make it extremely simple. The library itself is very robust and performant. What more could you ask? Download it now here.
Later, sat in on the Indefatigable Kunicki's talk on Research Services, where he introduced another wonderful new wizard and wrapper library. The OZ Research Services tool turns what is currently a somewhat painful, manual-XML-editing-intensive process into a real breeze. It's called The Research Services Object Model Wrapper and it consists of a library (RSCL) that wraps up the RS plumbing, offering strongly-typed Request and Response objects, allowing the developer to focus on the bizlogic. It ships with source, is designed to be extensible, and bundles a VS.NET wizard which asks a few simple questions and spits out a new research service (in C# or VB.NET).
Chris also demo'd his Research Services Tracing and Validation Tool, which does what it says on the tin - both for RSCL-based and hand-crafted research services. Very nice: request/response tracing (a bit like MSSoapT), schema validation, and regex support. Should be out on MSDN any day now, and the IK will post it to a gotdotnet workspace also. Can't wait. Meanwhile, check out tne new Research Services zone on OZ.
Dinner and a long discussion about the state of the Office nation. Where's it going? What are the trends in usage? Specifically, what is the programmability story moving forwards? Its clear that there is a growing realization in business that Office is a heavily underused resource sitting on everyone's desk. There's a real feel that we should be doing more with this resource. There's also an increasing willingness to extend Office and program against it for LoB apps instead of creating yet another custom application. IBF addresses this in a very timely fashion. VSTO 2005 will go a long way to support this. We have emerging toolsets that better support the development of Research Services and of SmartDocs. Office development is definitely looking up. Now a note of caution: with all these tools, all these different protocols for extending Office, the variation between versions and across Office products, etc, can lead to confusion in the mind of the user. It's our responsibility to clear up the confusion, to map the protocols to requirements, to impose sensible architectures and maintainable, reusable components. The opportunity to guide our customers to build solid foundations starts now.