* Generating Microsoft Office Documents with the Open XML SDK

Check out my latest article published on devx.com.

It’s about how to us Open XML sdk to generate Microsoft Office documents without VSTO or automation. Article is accompanied by code.

http://www.devx.com/dotnet/Article/42221

* OBA, Office Development and VSTO – Getting started

OBAs (Office Business Applications) are new types of application/solutions which are built on Office System 2007 as a platform and so deployed on top of Office System 2007 apps. The development stream to develop OBAs is called Office Development and the tools used to develop OBAs are called VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office).

A typical Information worker in any industry today uses various tools and communication channels to complete an atomic business process. The list may comprise of following:

· Line of Business Solution for Transactions etc.

· Content Management solution or Knowledge Portal for reference knowledge.

· Mails to communicate & share documents with peers

· Telephone calls for knowledge gathering/sharing

While middleware technologies have considerably improved the automation and workflow enablement of system based business processes, the business process which involve humans are still quite disjointed. There is a lot of opportunity to improve productivity and efficiency in human based workflows.

OBAs are newer kind of application which try to fill the gaps in human workflow by providing a simplified and yet powerful platform to collaborate and execute business processes. OBAs can be exposed to users via a popular and familiar Office client interface or web based interface.

OBAs leverages the following Office System capabilities:

· SharePoint workflow and Windows Workflow foundation.

· Extensible User Interface of Office Clients

· ECMA Office Open XML File formats

· Business Data Catalog for connecting to LOB applications.

· Search portal

· Business Intelligence and Reporting Services.

Pls find below the first three articles in this series.

OBA, Office Development, VSTO - An Overview

Visual Studio Tools for Office - Getting Started

VSTO - Application Level AddIn Architecture

VSTO - Document Level Customization Architecture

* Open XML SDK Version 2 April 2009 CTP Released

Open XML sdk is a huge productivity boost for development teams working on programming Office Documents.

April 2009 CTP of version 2 has been released while final release is expected to come with ‘Office 14’ release.

Version 1 allowed working on Open XML files at package level.

Version 2 earlier CTP allowed working @ parts level.

This CTP introduces Schema Level Validation functions.

Generate Office 2007 documents using OpenXML SDK

Download OpenXML sdk version 2 April 2009 CTP

* Sharepoint article series – Starts

I am starting an article series mainly for solution architects and others responsible for designing solution on Sharepoint platform.

It will start from the basics and will gradually move to designing Office Business Applications (OBAs) on Microsoft Office System.

Some of them will be high level while others quite hands-on.

The first three articles are published :

• Sharepoint Products and Technologies Overview
• Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) features and development
• Configure Outgoing Mails from Sharepoint

Let me know the article ideas on which you would like to read the articles.

* VSTO : How Office add-ins get loaded ?

• The main component responsible for loading add-ins is Add-In Loader AddinLoader.dll which gets installed with Visual Studio Tools for Office Runtime.
• When any Office client application starts it looks for all the add-ins registered in registry.
• The registry provides location of Application manifest file for each add-in.
• The Application manifest file contains mainly following information :
  • Version of the add-in
  • Location of Deployment manifest
  • Version, location name of assemblies used by the add-in.
• If Deployment Manifest(DM) is mentioned, the version numbers of Application manifest(AM) and deployment manifest are compared. If DM is of newer version than AM, this means the add-in has been upgraded and new AM is loaded whose location is mentioned in DM.
• If no upgrade is required, add-in assemblies are loaded by the runtime.
• For each add-in, runtime creates a separate application domain to load assemblies. This provides better isolation.
• Add-in assemblies are executed and ready to receive inputs from users or event notifications from office application.

 

What's New in VSTO 2008 v3.0

* What's New in VSTO 2008 v3

Here are some of the major new features introduced in VSTO 2008 v3.0 with respect to VSTO 2005 ( Second Edition)

• Document level customizations supported for Office 2007 : Document level add-ins allow you to attach add-ins to a particular document only instead of whole application.
• Visual Designers for Ribbons, Task Panes and Form Regions.
• Workflow and Sharepoint support.
• Deployment using ClickOnce
• Word content controls : Similar to Windows Forms controls.

Here are screen shots of Project Templates available in VSTO 2005 SE and VSTO 2008 v3

VSTO 2005 SE Project Templates

VSTO 2008 v3.0 Project Templates

* VSTO : Extend MS Office using Visual Studio Tools for Office

Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) is a set of Visual Studio plug-ins and project templates which assist in creating add-ins and document level customizations for Office client suite of products like MS Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint etc.

The current version available for Visual Studio 2005 is VSTO 2005 Second Edition (VSTO 2005 SE).

The current version available for Visual Studio 2008 is VSTO 2008 Version 3.0.

With some of the editions of Visual Studio 2005 like Team suite, VSTO comes pre-packaged while for others it can be downloaded freely and installed.

VSTO 2005 is also available as a stand-alone edition of Visual Studio.

The one which comes with VS 2005 needs to be upgraded with VSTO 2005 SE.

Here is how your VS 2005 splash screen will look after VSTO 2005 SE install.

The development of application level add-ins supported by VSTO 2005 SE are :

• Excel 2003, 2007
• Outlook 2003, 2007
• PowerPoint 2003, 2007
• Visio 2003, 2007
• Word 2003, 2007
• InfoPath 2007

Prerequisites on User's Computer where application level add-ins created using VSTO 2005 SE are going to run :

• Microsoft.NET Framework Version 2.0.
• Primary Interop Assemblies (PIA) for the version of Office for which add-in has been written : responsible for providing interface between managed and unmanaged world.
• VSTO 2005 SE Runtime : contains add-ins functionality not part of standard .NET runtime.
• Office Application for which add-in has been written.

Downloads

• VSTO 2005 Second Edition
• VSTO 2005 Runtime
• PIA for Microsoft Office 2003
• PIA for Microsoft Office 2007 

* Architecture : Free book on building composite applications using the Microsoft Platform

Microsoft's Industry Architecture team has released a free book on building composite applications using the Microsoft Platform. It discusses how to build composite applications as Office Business Applications (OBAs) using the 2007 Microsoft Office System.

The book discusses following topics in sequence:

1. Concept of composite applications and their benefits like enterprise alignment, adaptability and agility.

2. Introduces the 2007 Microsoft Office platform and the concept of OBAs.

3. Guidelines on deploying an OBA in an enterprise with a least impact on existing applications.

4. Details two different sample OBAs for retail and banking industry and the challenges faced. Some other sample OBAs also discussed.

The book can be read at following link :

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb220800.aspx