PDC Los Angeles Sep11-18
Blimey, 2 months have gone by since my last post. Apart from shipping Whidbey (a minor detail), I've been coordinating PDC this year for my team (VSTO). We have 8 sessions, an all-day pre-con session, 2 Hands-on-Labs, slots in keynotes, and a bunch of demos. PDC this year is about Vista and about Office 12 - both areas where we have a strong part to play. So, we're sending about a dozen people to LA for the duration. This is a big deal - especially if you remember that we're also still in the final stages of shipping VS Whidbey. Taking a big crew down to PDC at this time is a tough call, but we're very keen to expose our stuff to professional developers, and to get as much feedback as we can. Make sure you get hold of us and talk to us.
This is especially important as we head into planning for v3. VSTO 2005 (v2) ships with Whidbey in a couple of months. We're already working on v3 (the VS Orcas release). We'll be demo-ing a very early pre-alpha release of our v3 at PDC, targeting Office 12. The focus of this will be my OFF417 session, which is all about v3 + O12:
OFF417 - Visual Studio Tools for Office 'v3': Creating Office Application Customizations
September 15, 2:15 PM - 3:30 PM
Room: 409 AB
Andrew Whitechapel
See how the next version of the Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) will work with "Office 12" to provide application-level functionality for Visual Studio developers. Learn how the current popular capabilities for VSTO 2005 customizations of Word and Excel documents and add-ins for Outlook are being extended and broadened for "Office 12." This session walks through the development experience and capabilities, and dives into the implementation details that have made these advances possible.
If you want to get up to speed with our VSTO 2005 (v2) release before the main conference, then you need to go to our all-day pre-con session on the Monday:
Visual Studio Tools for Office: Developer Solutions Platform
September 12, 10:00 AM - 5:30 PM
Room: 511 ABC
Eric Carter, Misha Shneerson, Chung Webster, Andrew Whitechapel
This session provides comprehensive coverage of the VSTO 2005 architecture, tools and feature set. We'll look at how the underlying VSTO plumbing works and the range of capabilities and power of Office that gets exposed as a result. Armed with this information, you'll be able to build robust managed solutions that extend Office applications to meet your business requirements. VSTO 2005 offers many significant enhancements over VSTO 2003 for document-based solutions for Word and Excel, introduces InfoPath extensibility, and adds capabilities for building application-level solutions through extending Outlook. You can easily build solutions that use managed controls on the document or workbook surface and in the custom Actions Pane. VSTO supports server-side manipulation of documents, simplified smart tag and smart document development, manifest-based deployment and update, and a strict security model. This pre-conference day gets you up to speed with VSTO 2005 - good preparation for the main conference which focuses on VSTO vNext (post-2005). Also learn about Microsoft's Mobile Web Services SMS add-in for Outlook. This talk covers how we built a rich Outlook add-in providing seamless user interface integration using the .NET Framework, VSTO 2005 and the Outlook 2003 Object Model.
Here's a list of the sessions which have VSTO content (some more, some less), mostly in the Office track:
PRE10 VSTO 2005 (v2)
OFF417 Visual Studio Tools for Office 'v3': Creating Office Application Customizations
OFF304 Assembling, Repurposing and Manipulating Document Content Using the New Office File Format
September 13, 4:15 PM - 5:30 PM
406 AB
Brian Jones
The new Microsoft Office Open XML Formats are the default XML file formats for "Office 12". The power and accessibility of these XML file formats are designed for programmability and open up numerous scenarios for manipulating files, creating files from scratch, repurposing content and merging files with business data. This session explains the architecture of the new Open XML Formats, details of the application schemas and walks through how to create a couple of detailed solutions using the WinFX API to control file content.
OFF312 'Outlook 12' extensibility: Building messaging and collaboration solutions
September 15, 10:00 AM - 11:15 AM
406 AB
Randy Byrne
This session highlights the more important fundamental changes that will make "Outlook 12" a better development platform-making it easier to build solutions that are immediately more robust, usable and manageable. Learn about significant changes in programming the user interaction, the core object model and performance.
OFF319 'InfoPath 12': Developing forms for the smart client and browser
September 15, 3:45 PM - 5:00 PM
502 AB
Ned Friend
Rapid development of both client and browser forms is central theme of the next version of InfoPath. This session covers what's changed in forms development for "Office 12." Drill into deeper integration with Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System and the new all-managed object model. Learn how to reuse your work through form template parts and through migrating your existing forms investments with the importer/exporter framework. Understand how to integrate InfoPath forms into your own application by hosting InfoPath as an ActiveX or WinForm control, and how to extend InfoPath itself through COM add-ins.
OFF302 'Office 12': Developing with the new user experience customization model
September 13, 2:45 PM - 4:00 PM
402 AB
Andy Himberger
"Office 12" is introducing a new, declarative model for customizing the Office user interface using XML. This session dives into the details of the markup and the resulting behavior, describes how the markup interacts with DLL-based code, and provides guidance for migrating existing solutions and developing new ones.
OFF316 XML-based Programmability for Flexible 'Word 12' Document Solutions
September 15, 11:30 AM - 12:45 PM
406 AB
Tristan Davis
Word 2003 introduced the concept of structured documents with its support for custom XML. This session will show how Word "12" takes XML document programmability to a new level, offering improved robustness, more intuitive user interaction, and true data/view separation using the new XML file format. A basic overview of the improved out of the box capabilities (incl. integration with Windows SharePoint Services) will be introduced, and then the power behind those will be shown through a more complex scenario leveraging these features.
Finally, don't forget to try out our Hands-on-labs:
OFFHOL11 VSTO v3 Hands-on-lab