Memories of developing with Office...

Chris reminisces about writing MS certification exams in his Blast from the Past post. Well, going even further back, our first contracting job at Microsoft was writing the Excel SDK. This was in 1991 and came out of our bitching about Excel-based development at the Developer Tools Forum (the pre-cursor to TechEd) held in Seattle in August of that year. In yet another demonstration of serendipity, we actually worked for Joel Spolsky. Chris has used his FogBUGZ on a couple of projects, but I haven't been in contact with Joel in years.

Anyway, in those good old days the people who developed with Office apps included names like Tom Chester, Don Baarns, Steve Wexler, and Woody Leonhard (not sure of the spelling on some of those). My favorite "community" was the Word Gadflys, a bunch Word beta-testers that included Woody (who still, a fellow names Guy Gallo who was a scriptwriter / professor in NYC, and...Jim Gleick. Woody's still involved with Office (he publishes Woody's Office Watch) but I've lost track of the others. Except for Jim, who kind of blew the doors off the beta group by publishing an editorial called "Bugs in the Global Electronic Village" in the New York Times where he talked publicly about the beta process and how he felt MS was letting down developers. MS didn't mind when the Gadflys had badges produced that said "It's nota bug, it's a feature" and "Won't Fix" and handed them out at Comdex, but Chris Peters (the guy who retired from MS and bought the PBA) never got over that one. Chris did manage to forgive me for being quoted in Infoworld as saying he should be "gutted, stuffed, and turned into a fountain in Lake Bill"). <g>

I'll bet MS wished they had the same connection to the developer community now that they're getting ready to launch the NMVO (Next Major Version of Office). Then again, maybe not. <g>