I spent the day with the InfoPath SDK.  Hey, great rhyme.

Several months back when I first began exploring .NET support for Office 2003 I posted my wish for more .NET support in Outlook along with advertised support for its Word and Excel 2003 counterparts.  An MS MVP who I won't impune here was kind enough to respond that it didn't happen because there are only 24 hours in a day.  He also gave his opinion that he felt the implementation of .NET in Word and Excel was “hoaky” anyway.

Since its now gettin' real and I am obligated to have a working InfoPath form online with data populated and processed via Web Services sometime this week, I'm getting a taste for that “hoakiness” first hand.  Whenever I see a whole bunch of jscript and vbscript code to make a product perform its basic functions, I resent it.  InfoPath reminds me of Sharepoint 1.0.  If you wanted to do anything with a webpart, it was time to whip out some VBSCRIPT, baby!  Geee-zus.

I didn't find the InfoPath SDK very accessible either.  Smart people provided some good code, but making the leap from the samples provided to a real world eform was not an easy one.  The SDK did help me though, certainly, and I recommend it.  I also highly recommend a PerfectXML InfoPath article (though dated at April 2003) which after a long day of pouring over the SDK I did find accessible and is what I will base my Day Two InfoPath investigations in the AM.