This week will be my first week after officially terminating my previous job, even though I have been working for the new one for over a month. I had acquired a considerable amount of PTO hours, as I planned to wind down a bit, which allowed me to move into my new job earlier than expected.
I didn’t expect to move at all, but things get on your path you hadn’t imagined to be happening. If you asked me what 2024 would look like at the end of the year, I most likely wouldn’t have responded with an answer indicating I would be working for a company on the other side of the world.
I had a vacation scheduled in May, so I’m not entirely neglecting myself by starting a month before terminating the other. We returned from an impressive sea tour of the Mediterranean Sea and have been going through some updates that resulted from Microsoft’s Build 2024 Conference, which happened in the same week as my vacation, and, therefore, I was unable to attend.
This week will also be the week to celebrate my birthday, so everything feels like the big Ctrl-Alt-Delete … a milestone with the big reset of my life. Now, my fingers are crossed, and I hope the machine will return without moving into the Blue Screen.
With the vacation behind us and the old job terminated, we will start doing our livestreams again this week. If you have suggestions on what to look at first, let me know in the comments, and don’t forget to subscribe to the Soft as in Software YouTube Channel
As I posted on YouTube last week in the community area, I have an announcement to make. It’s a big step for me and a significant change in my life.
So here it is … after 28 years of working for the same employer, I quit my job and move forward. I won’t go into the exact details; I’d like to look forward and keep a positive mindset. You can follow me on LinkedIn to see if you are interested in my history (or even hook up; make sure you reference who you are and why you want to connect).
I like to work with tech and be on the bleeding edge of technology. I started as a junior software developer, first at a secondment agency doing short-term development jobs for various customers. After five years, someone reached out, and I joined one of the big accounting firms to work on their financial software systems. I learned much about financial systems then and even built an application that automatically created annual financial statements. Something accountants used to work on for weeks but could now be finished in a few days.
Moving forward, my work shifted from being a software developer to moving up the corporate ladder and sitting in meetings growing bigger development teams and, in the end, being more a People Manager than doing the things I loved to do: tinkering with software and extending software to provide better options for productivity to the Office or Information Workers.
I wanted a better job. Working in an increasingly restricted environment to avoid leaking information and being compliant with corporate standards kept me from doing what I love most: test-driving new technologies.
This reflects on family life, which is being grumpy after the daily drag. I even started to take time off one day a week – to work four days a week. I was beginning to look forward to my retirement.
Shortening my workweek allowed me to boost my YouTube and Twitch channels under the “Soft As In Software” umbrella, but I will discuss this later.
At that point, I received an email from a longtime friend living in the US, and he was asking me if VSTO (i.e., “Visual Studio Tools for the Office System”) is still a thing. A headhunter contacted him to see if he wanted to get a role in a specific job opening they were trying to fill. As an answer to his question, I told him, “Honestly, not really …” as VSTO is in the process of deprecation (at least maintenance mode) and will soon be replaced by its successor, based on OfficeJS. Therefore, I advised him to suggest that the headhunter should look for a consultant to move the tooling into the OfficeJS APIs instead.
My friend didn’t accept the job offer as he is doing great stuff elsewhere already, but he thought sharing my info with the headhunter would be good. I confirmed that you could always talk, and he passed along my information so I could discuss what they were looking for and see where it would end. We eventually discussed the situation, agreed on the terms and conditions, had a couple more interviews, and agreed to move forward.
With all that in place, the announcement is that after a 28-year tenure, I resigned from my current job and started working for a company in Canada and the United States. It is a hundred percent remote job. I am curious if I ever travel in that direction. At least I still try to attend the big conferences such as Build (not this year, as it is poorly timed this year precisely on my already planned vacation), Ignite, and, while it lasts, the Annual Global MVP Summit with Microsoft to stay in contact with everyone.
As mentioned above in some wording, my work will start where I left off 10 to 15 years ago, maintaining big VSTO Add-ins that extend the Microsoft Office suite, especially for financial service workers. I am also looking into ways to migrate this to the new Office environment (or environments; I should say, as Office is multi-platform these days and can run not only on Windows but also on a Mac, iOS, Android, and more) to make it future-proof. I am confident that we can get this to work in the new context and be the number one provider of productivity tools for financial analysts.
As for my YouTube and Twitch channels, this also means that I need to shift things. My working hours changed from Central European Time (CET) or Central European Summer Time (CEST) in the summer to Eastern Standard Time (EST) or Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) in the summer. I will now work in the US time zone and move my leisure time to the morning in the EU. With that, my Live Coding sessions will shift from twice a week, 8 PM to 11 PM CEST, to three times a week, around 12 PM to 2 PM CEST for Europe and just before the day begins in New York (I guess 6 AM to 8 AM). I hope to make this five(!) times a week, every day… but I want to start slowly and use it to see how it will fit in.
Make sure your follow my YouTube Channel, so you won’t miss a thing. Learn with me in live sessions, make mistakes, stumble and get up!
2024 has started and we are in the second week already. Time for a short recap, as always but like oliebollen, it is part of the tradition. Last year flew by before we knew it. A lot happened but also a lot did not happen.
On a personal level I have been working on my physical state and crazy as it is joined the 5AM club. While travelling to Microsoft Build 2023 I was jet-lagged and was waking up at around four or five AM due to shifted time zones. There is about a nine-hour time difference between my home location and Seattle where Microsoft Build was hosted at the time. I started working out in the gym at the hotel right after waking up and that is still my daily opening scene today.
My physical condition improved a lot, lost a lot of weight (knowing that I also gained a lot of muscle), improved my stamina, lowered my heart rate and extended my sleeping pattern by a few hours.
The downside of more sleep and exercising obviously is that there is not much time left after a day with an extended morning routine, walking to the gym, exercise, walking back from the gym, having breakfast and a shower and morning routine. Add to that a full working day and before you know it, it is time to go to bed again to get the right amount of sleep.
Before all of this I crawled out of bed late, worked for the day and had a long night on Twitch and YouTube to develop stuff online. I was able to crank out a lot of things on my computer but neglected the state of my body and it was already in a bad state after picking up COVID-19. The patterns changed a lot last year but also took a large bite out of my development segment as part of the digital life I was living before.
I still did a lot of things, not as visible as before, ‘off screen’ such as working and supporting my pet project to create Office Add-ins in the context of Blazor. I created the sample projects here in the official Microsoft OfficeDev/Office-Add-in-samples repo as a prototype and helper projects for the community to work on.
I also extended my Azure Developer Associate Certification and was rewarded for the eighteenth time Microsoft MVP again. Completely out of context I did another Transatlantic Disney Cruise to travel from Southampton to New York together with my wife.
Developments on a professional level were a bit disappointing in 2023 and therefore, for 2024, I decided that this will be a time to reflect. At this time working about a day less each week (professionally, that is) whenever possible and focusing more on the fun side of life by working on my own expense on projects that give more joy to see where we end up.
Life is short and therefore it is important to focus on the happy stuff and stay on the positive side in body and mind. There is a lot going on in the world that impacted a lot of innocent people last year. I won’t go too deep into that but apparently there are a few individuals who think it is necessary to spoil the lives of others for their benefit (is there?) and their own position. For 2024, let us all try to turn that around for the better and make sure we all have a safe and prosperous future on this planet. We need to turn the negatives into positive, don’t you agree?
The first week of 2023 is behind us, my ‘holidays’ are over, and it is time to boot up 2023. Officially you are not allowed to wish anyone a “Happy New Year” anymore after January 7th.
In the Netherlands, the holidays are a bit different this year compared to other years. In general, we take the last two weeks of the year off but given how Christmas and New Year ended up on the calendar the two-week holiday disconnect was now set to the last week of 2022 and the first week of 2023 by our government.
2022 has been an ups and down year for me. The Up was definitely the Transatlantic Cruise to celebrate my 25th wedding anniversary sailing from Dover to New York with stops in France, UK, Spain, and Bermuda. An experience I wouldn’t want to have missed for the world. The downside was that after staying away from it for over two years I finally got hit by COVID-19, most likely picked it up on our return trip flying back from New York to Berlin or on the train from Berlin to Amsterdam, where we ran into huge crowds all coughing and sneezing while travelling home using airplanes and trains.
Although COVID-19 did not hit me very hard, a mild flu without too much fever, the coughing didn’t go away and kept going on a low level. Just before X-mas, however, I adopted a heavy flu infection. I guess I was still somewhat vulnerable to not being completely recovered from COVID. This resulted in a Pneumonia and my body didn’t allow me to do anything beyond having a time-out. My ‘Body Battery’ didn’t even climb up on my Garmin and zero-ed out for a lengthy period.
Time to visit the doctor (last time was about 10 years ago, I am -knock on wood- not much of a doctor visitor). The examination by my doctor resulted in a huge pile of medication with powerful types that started to kick in the moment I took them in. It looks like things are changing for the better now, at least my ‘Body Battery’ is showing upward movements again.
From a Soft as in Software perspective 2022 was not bad, until my health went south that is. In 2022 I created Office Add-in Starter projects to have new fresh Office Developers to easily get started building their first Word, Excel or Outlook Add-ins using Office JavaScript APIs. Also, I was able to build Blazor based Office Add-ins allowing you to use more .NET based coding, still allowing you to interact with Office hosts such as Word, Excel, or Outlook.
I pushed all of my Office Add-in demo repos into the official Microsoft OfficeDev/Office-Add-in-samples repo by creating Pull Requests and even did some small presentations on the Microsoft Office Add-ins Community calls.
Here are the links to the Add-ins and presentations:
Look at the above links and try to build some of your own Office Add-ins and let me know what you like or don’t like about it. I think the option to use Blazor in your Office Add-ins can be a powerful help if you are a .NET developer from origin and should make it easier to hook into Office, maybe allowing you to move your VSTO Office Add-ins into Office JS Add-ins.
So, there is my New Year’s rant … let’s focus on the future and see where we are going. For one thing my body just warned and gave a clear message to put your health at number one.
One of the hidden gems in Visual Studio is the option to enable Inline Hints. This will show little labels in your code to show what type of parameter is required for your functions, methods and what not. Also, it will show you what the return type is in case you assign the return value to a var typed variable:
Here is what it looks like in the editor:
Inline Parameter Name HintsInline Type Hints
To enable/disable Display Inline Hints you must go to Tools/Options/Text Editor/C#/Advanced and set the checks for Display inline parameter name hints and/or Display inline type hints.
Enable/Disable Display Inline Hints
This can help you coding in several ways. It allows you to immediately see what is expected so it makes it easier to understand what the code is doing, but it also allows you to refactor your code and make changes accordingly to match the hints or use named parameters.
It’s gems like these that make your life as coder much easier, especially if you adopt code from -another- developer where you need to understand what is happening in the existing code you adopted.
We left behind 2021, our second year covered with Covid, and moved into 2022. Just when I was about to close the year, traditionally baking a huge batch of “Oliebollen”, “Appelflappen” and “Ananasflappen” (Google it if you don’t know what they are), I received an email from Twitch Corp telling me that I leveled up to Twitch Affiliate.
Twitch Affiliate
If you look at the specs it doesn’t feel like a massive thing:
– Reach fifty followers – Stream for eight hours – Stream on seven different days – Average of three viewers
… but it is harder than you think.
The requirements span is within a 30-day timeframe. The “Stream for eight hours” and ” Stream on seven different days” are the easy ones although reserving seven days out of thirty to do live streaming is already hard to reach for most but it is something you simply can set your mind to and do it without the help of the community. It means streaming twice a week for over an hour to get the eight hours and seven instances in place.
With a niche subject (Live Coding is already a niche subject on its own on Twitch) such as Office Development, coding in general, it is extra hard to get someone’s attention on Twitch. Twitch is more focused on gaming where streamers are sharing their gameplay on stream.
Twitch is not actively pushing content under the noses of people, so you must build your own attention to your channel. Next step is to reach the fifty followers and average of three viewers. Especially the last part, getting an average of three viewers during the full eight hours is tough. People quickly visit and leave after watching for a while, and as it is a chicken-egg issue (more viewers give more interaction making it more interesting to join in and stick around) they usually zap over to other channels after watching a few minutes. If lucky you get them to follow you and show up again at a later session.
In the last week of the year, I was lucky another developer channel on Twitch, going by the name of “one1lion”, to raid my channel when he ended streaming for the day and that gave exposure to my channel from another direction. I really appreciate him doing that for me and make sure you visit his channel; you can learn a thing or two from that.
Anyway, 2022 started with a blast for me, let’s see where we go this year and check in at my now Twitch Affiliate channel and hit the follow button!
I have been preparing this for some time now, but still in progress … I moved my personal blog from www.maartenvanstam.nl to the Soft as in Softwareblog.softasinsoftware.com. In fact, the old blog still exists but as you are reading this, new posts will only appear on this address: blog.softasinsoftware.com.
The purpose of this blog is that it will match my ‘new’ media where my blog will match my video streams on my Soft as in SoftwareYouTube channel, and my Soft as in SoftwareTwitch channel. Don’t forget to subscribe to the YouTube channel or follow the Twitch channel while you are at it 😉.
I have picked up Live Coding again on YouTube and Twitch where I currently focus on Office Add-in development and Blazor Web Assembly development.
With Office Add-in development the focus is on the OfficeDev PnP repo monitored by Microsoft. This repo needs some serious attention to get it up to a decent quality standard. Some samples are outdated, new samples are needed, so in short much to do there. If you are into that feel free to join me on that.
For Blazor Web Assembly the goal is to rebuild my Soft as in Software landing page. This will be my main source related to the Soft as in Software ‘brand’ if you like. Even this blog will be available from that site. So, if you forgot where to find my blog, simply go the Soft as in Software landing page where you can find the blog in one of the menu items.
With this quick post I re-open my blog and if you are into Office Development (this is a huge area so keep coming back for one or more Office Development updates) or .NET/Blazor minded this blog, my videos on YouTube or Live Stream on YouTube and Twitch might interest you as well.
I have so many plans with this, I am looking forward to a new fresh start and I like to make this interactive, so if you want to share your comments or work with me on the repos, just holler and we’ll see how we can get this going.
In my next blog I will get into some more details on what happened and get into my plans for all of this. Stay tuned!
I had issues adding a specific Office365 email account to my Outlook 2016 desktop application on one of my machines for a while now. Giving me the "something went wrong and outlook couldn’t set up your account. please try again. if the problem continues, contact your email administrator." message and no options to add information manually in Outlook 2016.
So with the new year I decided to give it another go and see if I could solve it looking at it with a fresh mindset.
It runs you through a series of questions and analyses the settings (for Outlook 2016 and Office365 in this case) to find that it had issues getting the mail properties, fixed it and created a new Outlook profile that actually worked!
I wanted to get the email account in the existing profile however, but that wasn’t an issue either anymore … Just went over the process of adding the new email account like I used to and now it magically added the account without issues at all. Apparently it also changed something on my Outlook installation but who cares. I finally got my long failing email account to work in 2020 … how is that for a Happy 2020
It’s been a while, almost year, here … and whenever there is a new year, we pick up our resolutions from last year and see what we can do that we missed progressing the past year. Blogging is one of these things … so let’s pick this up again for now and see where it ends.
In my professional work I’ve been limited in doing things programmer-wise, more a people manager than coding manager at this time. Trying to get our foreign team up and running and at sometimes actually deliver some products. Doing so means I have almost no time at all to do programming.
For this reason, I decided to go on and do the Live Coding thing. Forcing me to go live in front of a camera and coding live on screen is pushing me to keep my coding skills on par. Not easy as what you learn today is outdated tomorrow, but boy … the things you can do in code these days are absolutely amazing!
So join me in my Live Coding sessions on Twitch. You can find my channel here:
Hit the follow button if you are, like me, too lazy to look up the broadcast schedule so you get notified whenever I get online to do the Programming Thing.
At this time I’m working on two main topics:
· Office Development (Who would have guessed?) where I’m trying to do the same things that I was able to do using VSTO to build my Add-ins. Spoiler Alert: You can’t do everything you were able to do with VSTO, but you can do some cool shit anyway …
· Blazor Web Development, building web sites using C# and .NET Core … where Office moved away from .NET to Web Technologies .NET did exactly the other way around and is now focusing on Web Technologies!
Let me know what you think about all these new and not so recent technologies … will they save the world?
Last two years I have been webcasting every Thursday at 8PM GMT+1/CET on our SDN Cast with my buddies Marcel Meijer, Fanie Reynders and recently added as fourth member Gerald Versluis. In this webcast we on a weekly base discuss the news, events on Software Development and added some demos. Usually the webcast was in Dutch but when we had international guests we shifted to English.
Running the webcast is fun, informal and sometimes high level on discussions when talking about Software Development. Last couple of weeks Fanie Reynders and I have been researching to extend our webcasts with actual live coding sessions. Fanie is focusing on his expertise dotNET Core and I am focusing on Office Development.
Hopefully we will also bring in Gerald Versluis coding on Xamarin and related stuff.
So, starting last Tuesday I started (and planned to do this every next Tuesday in the upcoming weeks) my first Live Coding session on Office Development. Basically I started with where I started blogging about the ‘new’ Office Add-ins
Older Office Development Blog Posts starting here:
A lot of time went by, and what I liked to do is looking back on my blogposts and see if they still can stand the shift in time all the way to 2019.
In my first Live Coding session I immediately jumped in to building the first Word Add-in in two ways, one in Visual Studio 2019 (Preview!) and one using Yeoman. I did realize however that I probably should have discussed a bit of starting information first, just like I did in my blog posts. I might jump back a bit in the next Live Coding session next Tuesday February 5 (Click <- to see when this will be in your location)
My weekly Live Coding – Office Development webcasts will always be in English (as far as my English goes that is, pretty sure you’ll get the Dutch dialect for free ) so everyone in theory should be able to follow what I am doing. It is still work in progress.
Fanie and I are still researching and working on the streaming tools, there is a lot going on producing live webcasts so don’t kill us if we get a crappy chatroom or other bad widgets in the first couple of weeks .
) so everyone in theory should be able to follow what I am doing. It is still work in progress. 
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