Andrew Whitechapel

Moving Blog (Temporarily?)

2005-10-04T20:41:00Z

The Indefatigable Chris Kunicki started me blogging, and I've had my blog on the OfficeZealot site ever since. Of course it goes without saying that the OZ site is the best place to be, and I've been very happy here. However, I believe in trying new things, so I'm having a bash at the MSDN blog site for a while. I'll keep all my old posts on OZ for now, and cross-link.

So, for now at least, my blog is here.

Good Misha and Evil Misha

2005-09-10T03:21:00Z

We're heading down to LA at the crack of dawn tomorrow morning (well, ok 1pm). PDC this year is going to be a blast. Lots of cool new stuff that's actually close to shipping, plus lots of really exciting newer stuff that's a little further away. A chance to see Microsoft's directions and roadmap. A chance to ask lots of tough questions.

Now, if I'd taken the blue pill, if I'd been brainwashed by the machine, I'd say things like “I'm super-excited about “. Fortunately, of course, I took the red pill. I was chatting to a friend at Avanade last night over a saucy little cab-sav, and he had an interesting observation. We're about to ship Whidbey: you'd think, we're 2 months away from shipping a major product, yet we take out huge swathes of the most critical people to spend a week in LA talking to developers. Not to mention the zillions of person-hours that have gone into prepping for PDC - the decks, the demos, the early builds, just the logistics + scheduling nightmare etc etc.

How does this make any sense? Are we insane to do this? So here's the thing. We're pretty confident about the quality of the Whidbey release, so we're locking down now and in the final stages of shipping. Not quite a done-deal, but very nearly. On the other hand, we're well into Orcas planning, and we need input from professional developers. We really really need all PDC attendees to give us feedback, tell us your requirements, tell us what you're “super-excited“ about, and what you're super-frustrated about. We need as many different perspectives as possible, from SMBs, Enterprise customers, Partners, ISVs and Microsoft field people.

All Microsoft staffers have to wear school uniform (khaki slacks, blue Microsoft shirt), so you can't miss us. Don't be shy. Don't let us get away with anything. You see any one of us, you come up and talk to us.

Of course, at the same time as getting input from you (oh, sorry, “you-all“), we'll be boasting about the wonderful shiny new stuff we've been working on back at the ranch. There will be some stuff you'll “ooh“ + “ah“ about, make no mistake. We're very pleased with our new toys. Developers have never had it so good.

To make sure we do the best possible job, I'm taking all my best people - well, the ones we can take out and put in front of real people, anyway - not the ones we have to keep chained up in the cellar. The exception to this rule is Misha Shneerson. We decided that as PDC will be chock-full of uber-geeks, we simply had to bring Misha. There is no tough question you can possibly ask that Misha can't answer. Misha knows all the inner workings of our scariest hairiest code. So here's a challenge to PDC attendees: can you ask a question that stumps Misha? I'll bet you a free soda you can't. (Oh, the sodas are free anyway? OK, I'll bet you two free sodas). Bring it.

PDC Los Angeles Sep11-18

2005-09-05T21:31:00Z

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

PDC 05

2005-07-18T06:30:00Z

PDC will be in Los Angeles again this year. For details, start here. For anyone who went in 2003, a few points:

The event was very crowded last time, so this year there's a (slightly) lower maximum number of attendees. This is good news for the simple logistics of getting from session A to session B, and it means you need to register *early* if you want to be sure of a place.
Yes, we will be talking about Longhorn again - but this time it's a lot closer to real shipping dates (honest, guv).
As always, we're targeting professional developers, so expect very little marketing material and lots of very in-depth technical detail.

The sessions are organized into 6 tracks, which are summarized here. You can get a (nearly) complete list of all sessions here.

This year there are 2 days of pre-conference sessions, with about 8 different technology tracks on each day. This starts Sunday 11 September. On Monday 12 September, there'll be a full day of VSTO pre-con sessions - this will focus on VSTO 2005 and is designed to get you up to speed on the version we ship with Whidbey. The main conference sessions are more forward-looking, and focus on vNext - the version aimed at Office 12 and Orcas.

This year's event promises to be a lot of fun, and a lot of work. In addition to the pre-con, keynotes, breakout sessions and lunchtime sessions, we're also putting a lot of stuff into the BAR (that's big-ass room to you) - track lounges, ATE, BOF, HOLs, vendor pavilion, internet alley, and the bean-bag lounge.

Be there, or be square - register here.

Outlook Shutdown and VSTO Add-ins

2005-07-11T01:32:00Z

Just back from Amsterdam. My TechEd talk on VSTO Outlook Add-in Support was the usual curate's egg. Some people liked it, and welcomed the technical detail. Others - curiously for a 'technical education' conference, felt that it was _too_ technical and complained that I hadn't cracked enough jokes. Oh well, takes all sorts I suppose <sigh>. Anyway, continuing the theme, some more technical details follow...

Under some circumstances, when Outlook is hosting COM add-ins, Outlook doesn’t shut down cleanly - the add-in’s OnDisconnection method doesn’t get called if the add-in has outstanding variables that are still holding Outlook objects. This is effectively a deadlock: the add-in will keep holding references until it gets an OnDisconnection call, but Outlook never makes the OnDisconnection call because the add-in is still holding references. This is a problem with traditional IDTExtensibility2 add-ins, and we have addressed the problem with VSTO IStartup add-ins.

The VSTO AddinLoader.dll and the VSTO runtime itself are very largely host-agnostic. That is, they consist almost entirely of functionality that is generic and can be re-used across multiple host applications. The only application-specific functionality in AddinLoader.dll is a workaround for the Outlook shutdown problem.

AddinLoader listens to Outlook’s Explorer.Close, Inspector.Close and Application.Quit events. When there are no Explorers/Inspectors open or when Application.Quit is raised, it calls the Shutdown method on the IStartup add-in, and then unloads the AppDomain thereby cleaning up the references that are making Outlook not shut down cleanly. This covers the vast majority of Outlook add-ins.

However, there is another problem with Outlook’s shutdown behavior. Outlook is often automated externally without showing any UI. For example, ActiveSync does this. In this situation, the count of Explorers and Inspectors starts at zero, so it may never go above zero, but even if it does, when it returns to zero it is no longer safe to assume that this indicates that Outlook is shutting down. To further complicate the issue, Outlook may start without UI through automation, but then the user may interactively launch Outlook – which merely makes the current running instance of Outlook show its UI.

To mitigate (but not completely fix) these problems, we keep track of add-ins that want to load, and support a ‘dormant’ add-in state where the add-in is not loaded but we are aware that it might need to be loaded. This is the behavior:

1. Outlook starts (with or without UI).

2. AddinLoader is loaded for each add-in.

3. If (UI is present), we load the add-in, and proceed normally.

4. Else (UI is not present), we don't load the add-in, but we remember that this add-in tried to load. That is, we put the add-in into the ‘dormant’ state. The unmanaged AddinLoader component itself remains loaded, but no managed code is loaded yet, and no AppDomain is created yet.

5. Each instance of AddinLoader sinks the NewExplorer and NewInspector events. These will fire when Outlook shows any UI. When we get a NewExplorer/NewInspector event, we load the 'dormant' add-in, and proceed normally.

6. AddinLoader also sinks the ExplorerClose and InspectorClose events. These fire when Outlook windows are closing. When we get one of these events, if the count of Explorers and Inspectors is zero (meaning that there is no UI), we unload the add-in, again returning it to the ‘dormant’ state (so that we can load it again later, if required).

7. When we unload the add-in, we also tear down the AppDomain – in fact, this is how we unload the add-in assembly itself.

This ‘dormant state’ functionality extends our shutdown support to cover an additional category of add-ins that cannot function without UI.