Office 2003 Dev

Learn how to create a Business Data Catalog Entities & Relationships

John Peltonen — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 22:52:00 GMT

MSDN just published two Visual How-Tos that I created that walk you through building the XML metadata for creating an entity and then a series of related entities. They're pretty simplistic in nature and literally start you with a blank XML file. So, if you are interested in learning some of the very basics of the Business Data Catalog, you should check them out :-)

Creating Business Data Catalog Entities in SharePoint Server 2007
Filtering One Business Data Catalog List from Another by Using Associations in SharePoint Server 2007

Embarrassingly, these titles are actually longer than their URLs:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb410048.aspx
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb410047.aspx

On recording a Visual How-To for the MSDN folks.

John Peltonen — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 22:47:00 GMT

I'd like to thank the the MSDN team for giving me a crack at creating a few Visual How-To's for their site. If you've ever seen me present, you know that I have a very off-the-cuff style of presenting. My presentations are usually demo heavy and while things usually don't go perfectly, you'll generally be able to leave the presentation knowing what happened and why. I like to think I'm good at presenting.

Having said that, I'm discovering that while I'm definitely made for the stage, film is another beast entirely. All of a sudden all of those little goofs that are perfectly acceptable in a live demo stand out like a sore thumb in a WMV file. Naturally, I'll try to fix them, so I go back and edit just that part of the video but magically my voice turns out louder or the mouse jumps or (because I forgot to hide my task bar) I magically move forward and then backward in time between my edits. It was soooo much harder to get right than presenting. I was quite suprised, so, if you see a visual How-To that you particularly like, be sure to track down the auther and send him/her some Kudo's for their hard work :)

Server-side document generation of Word 2007 files

John Peltonen — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 02:19:00 GMT

I bet you thought this was going to be a post about the spiffy new Content Controls and all of the spiffy new scenarios they give us when we bind them to a custom XML file in the new docx file format. Well, nope, I'm not even going to mention that. Instead, I'm going to post about another option that can help if you need to generate a document from XML data with repeating nodes...

2006 Office Developer Conference

John Peltonen — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 16:33:00 GMT

Well, the conference has been going really well. I've been working with Office 2007 for almost a year now, and even I feel like I'm drinking from a fire hose! I'm currently chilling in John Durant's VSTO 2005 session. He went on at 8:30 this morning (after the party last night) and is waking everyone one up with his absolutely rocking presentation style! Next time you are at a conference, go see him talk. Even if you're not into office development, it is worth seeing him do his thing.

After this, I've gotta run back to my office to prepare for my presentation later today!

Where has all the time gone?

John Peltonen — Sat, 31 Dec 2005 23:32:00 GMT

Wow, I can't believe how long it has been since I last bloged. Since September, I've been very heads down in the land of Office 12. Sadly, this means that there hasn't been a lot to blog about! However, 3Sharp is working on a rather large O11 development project that really deserves some blogging attention - Lots of SharePoint automation, InfoPath, Outlook AddIns and all sorts of other fun stuff.

However, that post will have to wait for another day. Currently, I'm just popping online to take a breather from the latest O12 demo we're working on. This current demo is meant to show off what you can do without code (a real change for us)! All I can say is that Office has come a long way from the FabriKam days! Just in terms of workflow alone, what took as many lines of code we now get for free!

More on Integrating Office with Lotus Notes

John Peltonen — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 00:21:00 GMT

I just found out that a web cast I gave back in June was rated in the top 10 for something-or-another. It's called Integrating Microsoft Office 2003 with Lotus Notes/Domino and, as you can probably guess, it's all about integrating Office System 2003 Professional with Lotus Notes. If you're looking for info on the subject, I've packed a lot into that hour-long slot.

We build an InfoPath form that submits to Notes and then pull Notes data down into Excel for reporting. All as XML of course. I can't remember what I had to cut from my course material, but I believe I also convert Notes data into Word docs. If you watch it and still have questions, feel free to contact me here!

Tech Ed - Wednesday Report

John Peltonen — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 20:03:00 GMT

Now that my presentations are over, I've been able to relax enough to check out some sessions. I'm glad that they scheduled me for early in the conference. Btw, thanks to everyone who gave me feedback. I really appreciated the kind comments.

Yesterday morning, I dragged myself out of bed a little later than I was planning, but was still able to make the 2nd half of John Durant's presentation on Programming Microsoft Office Word XML Solutions. John has amazing amounts of energy. His ability to pick a few topics and just drill his point home in an extremely engaging way is very impressive.

I then just hung out in the cabana's for a while & chatted with people about XML & Office programming. I'm psyched to see all of the creative ways these technologies are being used.

I also had to check out Charles Maxson's session on Programming Microsoft Office Excel XML Solutions. (Do you see a pattern here?). Charles was great, as always, and his demos were really polished. Next time, Charles, I would appreciate it if you could tone them down a bit so mine don't look so sloppy :^) Charles made all the content available on his blog so you can follow along at home.

Finally, John and Charles were gracious enough to invite me in to help panel their cabana talk. The three of us chatted with about 20 people all about their solutions surrounding Office 2003, XML and VSTO - very cool stuff! We even had special guest appearances by Paul Stubbs and Joe Andreshak.

TechEd Presentation: CLI319 (complex LOB solutions with Office)

John Peltonen — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 16:14:00 GMT

I'm about an hour away from delivering session number two down in HOT & HUMID Orlando. Here is the rather long list of links that I am going to make reference to!

FabriKam SharePoint Workflow documentation
SharePoint GotDotNet Workflow Connector
K2.Net (you can also go visit them at their booth down here)
MSDN: Customizing the Shortcut Menu for [SharePoint] List Items
MSDN: Custom CAML Views in SharePoint Team Services
Programmatically import form library files into Excel
Online SharePoint Portal Server labs
FabriKam SQLXML Adapter documentation
XML Support in SQL Server 2005
XML Options in SQL Server 2005
MSDN: VSTO Technical Articles
VSTO Team Blogs: 2005 2003
GeneriCo
Smart Client Offline Application Block

Links for CLI315 @ TechEd

John Peltonen — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 12:16:00 GMT

Update: added links to Andrew & David's blogs as mentioned in the presentation

I'm 2.5 hours away from giving presentation #1 at TechEd. This presentation will be very similar to my architectural section at the Office Dev conference. My goal is to talk about all of the cool features in Office 2003 in the context of solutions. As usual, I'll be using FabriKam and GeneriCo as examples, although in this presentation, we won't be getting into code. HOWEVER, tomorrow's presentation (CLI319 at 1:30) we'll be looking TONS of code.

Anyway, I want to post the links from the first session because some of them are very long and it would be a real pain to write them down!

FabriKam Order Site
FabriKam documentation
Connected Systems Business Kit Order Site (GeneriCo)
Andrew Whitechapel's blog (managed code for Office)
David Hill's blog (specifically, check out his post on composite smart clients)

Getting to know SharePoint

John Peltonen — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 19:57:00 GMT

I'm in the midst of giving a road show on extending Lotus Notes apps with Microsoft Technologies (managed code, web services, custom COM components, XML integration with Office System & SharePoint, etc...). It doesn't cost anything to attend and you get cool stuff like company store credit and potentially other giveaways like VB.Net (not to mention getting to spend 8 hours with yours truly *grin*)

Besides the blatant advertising, this post is for all of the Lotus Notes developers I've been talking to over the past few weeks who are interested in SharePoint. We only have an hour or two to talk about SharePoint in the course and the product is so much deeper than what we have time to cover.

Fortunately, Microsoft is hosting a series of online labs that let you terminal in to a sandboxed server where you can configure and program to SharePoint Portal Server. Here is a list of the labs that you can try for free without having to bother with setting up a machine!

An Introduction to Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies
Creating a Custom Site Definition for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services
Creating a Web Part for Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies
Creating Connectible Web Parts for Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies
Managing Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Content and Navigation
Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 People and Personalization
Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Permissions Management
Using Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 to Customize Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services
Using Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services with Microsoft Office Professional 2003 Applications
Using the Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Object Model