Contents tagged with Office
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VSTO: My Favorite Feature - Custom Task Panes
My avid readers (both of you) know that I've done quite a bit of work around Outlook 2007 Form Regions in Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office. If you missed those posts, you can read more about them here and here. Form Regions are a great way to add custom functionality to Outlook forms but there's another way you can add features and Windows forms to all of the Office applications and unlike Form Regions (pre-Orcas) it's really easy. Therefore one of my favorite features is Custom Task Panes.
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MSDN Webcast: Visual Studio Tools for Microsoft Office from the Experts Series
Yesterday I had the honor of joining such names as Ken Getz, Tim Huckaby, and Robert Green by recording a webcast for MSDN in the VSTO Straight from the Experts Series. In this webcast I demoed the FormRegionAddin templates I created for Visual Studio 2005 and showed how they worked under the covers to help make building Outlook 2007 Form Regions easier. I also showed how the new Table object in the Outlook object model can greatly improve performance when working with itmes in folders.
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VSTO "Orcas" Ribbon Designer
Kathleen McGrath has a great blog post about her favorite feature in the upcoming "Orcas" release of VSTO, the new Ribbon Designer. The Ribbon Designer lets you extend the Office 2007 Ribbon interface with your own controls. She even includes a video walkthrough of using the designer to create tabs, groups, and buttons. She also points out some limitations in the Ribbon designer in that you can't directly reuse the button events from the Office product, i.e. you can't add a new button that calls Word's built-in Bold functionality. Hopefully this is something that will be addressed in later CTPs.
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RCPI Outlook 2007 Form Region Add-In Templates Released
After what seems like months but in fact has only been.... months, I'm finally ready to release what I hope will be a useful bit of code for anybody wanting to use Outlook 2007 Form Regions.
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Vista and Office 2007 Launch Happenings...
While Windows Vista and Office 2007 are generally available to the public now, Microsoft is hosting launch events all of the USA over the next month. But last week several MVPs got the opportunity to visit local retailers and give demos and offer advice on Windows and Vista to customers at major retail outlets like Best Buy, Circuit City, Fry's Electronics, etc. I volunteered to work at Best Buy #167 in The Woodlands, TX (Just north of Houston). They had some nice Vista end cap displays including an early look at the new HP TouchSmartPC which drew a lot of attention. While traffic was light the evenings I worked (the weather in Houston has sucked lately) I am happy to say that I was able to show off Office 2007 to several customers who then decided to buy it.
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.NET Predictions for 2007 - The Magic 8-Ball Rides Again
While I was editor for TheServerSide.NET, one of the more fun things I got to do was to write up humorous (hopefully) articles and cartoons. I've been missing that lately so I've decided to cut loose here in blogland. So here now are my predictions for 2007. Read and be amazed.
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Separating RSS Feeds from Email using Send/Receive Groups
One of the nicer new features in Outlook 2007 is the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds and read them just like emails. There's been a bit of confusion lately though about how RSS is tied to the Email Send/Receive in Outlook 2007. So for those people with huge bloglists, here are detailed instructions on how to separate the retrieval of RSS feeds from your normal email by using Send/Receive groups.
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VSLive! Dallas November 14-17
It's been a pretty busy year for me in regards to speaking engagements. I just wrapped up a whirlwind tour speaking at back to back user group conferences, DevLink '06 in Nashville and the Tulsa TechFest in... well... Tulsa. Unfortunately for me I didn't think to check a globe before agreeing to the two conferences and so I had to break the land speed record getting from Nashville on Friday in time to speak in Tulsa on Saturday. But all went well, and everybody had a great time.
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Tech-Ed 06 Demo Code - Writing Outlook Add-ins using Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005
As promised, here is the source code for the demos I did during my breakout session OFC331 - Creating and Using Outlook Add-ins in Visual Studio Tools for OFfice 2005. There are two demos and each one shows different aspects of Outlook customization. The demos are written in VB.NET.
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Tech-Ed 2006 - A Very Busy Week Ahead
For the past four years I've enjoyed going to Tech-Ed, Microsoft's premiere technical education conference. This might have something to do with the first one I attended combining the fun and craziness of New Orleans with meeting people who would truly become some of my very best friends. This year however I'm not simply going to be wandering its halls looking for the next Don Box talk. This year, I've gotten involved up to my neck, and so next week is going to be a VERY busy week for me. Here are a few places you'll be able to find me.