FabriKam

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!

Office Zealot Podcast #6 is Live

John Peltonen — Tue, 09 Aug 2005 16:17:00 GMT

I just thought that Charles and Chris were calling to say “Hi.” Little did I know they were secretly recording the call!

In the latest OZ Podcast, Podcast #6, I was lucky enough to be interviewed by these two Office masters. They let me ramble on about my theories of Office development and some of the large publicly available Office 11 solutions that 3Sharp has done - FabriKam and GeneriCo: what they are, how to use them what was hard and what is cool :^)

At they end of the interview they asked me where people should go for more info. I, showing my inability to think on my feet, couldn't come up with much. So here's a new list:

a) The Office Zealot blog feed (duh). This feed is the best single source of information out there for up to the minute development information about the entire Office suite! The only catch is that it can be a bit overwhelming. I subscribe to the main feed with Newsgator so that all the posts end up in Outlook. Additionally, I use Lookout to index all of the feed so that I can do targeted searches across months of valuable posts all within Outlook!

b) Understanding XML is key to Office development nowadays. Aaron Skonnard and Martin Gudgin have a good reference book called Essential XML Quick Reference that covers many of the XML specifications and can be downloaded for free! Priscilla Walmsley's book, Definitive XML Schema is also superb. Finally, the W3C also has a great XML schema primer.

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

FabriKam Tip

John Peltonen — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 12:24:00 GMT

Since I'm on a FabriKam kick here at TechEd, I figured I'd post tips as they came up. Tip number one is - Don't log in as administrator!

Instead, login as BrianC. We use the Active Directory to store the org chart info for FabriKam as well as some custom stuff such as signing authority for budgets and expense reports. Naturally, the admin account doesn't have any of these settings configured. However, BrianC is both a full-fledged employee and an administrator.

Tip number one point five: Everyone's password in FabriKam is P@ssw0rd.

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)

FabriKam is shipping!

John Peltonen — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 17:37:00 GMT

Well, we finally got FabriKam out of the door! I used to know the numbers (almost all of our development was finished last year around this time) but I can tell you that it represents:

Over 3 years of developer time (assuming 40 hour work weeks)
20,000+ lines of managed code
600 pages of documentation
Obviously a strong use of Office System (lots of emphasis on InfoPath and SharePoint)
Strong use of Back Office (BTS 04, SQL2K w/SQL XML)

It's not perfect, but we're definitely proud of it. Now it is yours to enjoy and learn from!

SOL 340 - Office Solution Architecture...

John Peltonen — Sat, 05 Feb 2005 02:02:00 GMT

Thanks to everyone who stayed late in the day on Friday to catch my talk on Office Solution Architecture. I really appreciate the fact that you guys had planes to catch, movies to watch, and headaches (from 3 straight days of raw data fed into your brains) and you still sat through an hour of me yammering away on Office :^) ...Click through to my blog for all of the linking goodness...

Kid in a Candy Store

John Peltonen — Fri, 28 Jan 2005 01:52:00 GMT

I need to finish my presentations for the Office Developer Conference next week here in Seattle but instead I'm procrastinating by browsing through the other presentations. I'm seriously debating leaving my office for three straight days (unheard of) and spending the 2nd through 4th camped out at Microsoft taking in all of that Office goodness. There's so much content here...

Office System Solutions

John Peltonen — Fri, 21 Jan 2005 23:44:00 GMT

Thanks again to those of you who dragged yourselves out of bed to hear me speak at Envision! This post has a list of links that I made reference to in the presentation along with a description of what I'm linking to...