Office Development – Word

In my previous post I mentioned the confusion for the JavaScript APIs for Office in general. Today we’ll go deeper in and focus on the API support for the various Word clients. Let’s see what APIs are available for each of the Word clients in detail and finish off with the observations once we identified what is in each client for Word:

Word Online

Extension Points

Taskpane
Add-in Commands

APIs

Word API 1.1
Word API 1.2
Word API 1.3
Dialog API 1.1

Shared APIs

BindingEvents
CustomXmlParts
DocumentEvents
ImageCoercion
MatrixBindings
MatrixCoercion
Settings
TableBindings
TableCoercion
Text File
TextBindings
TextCoercion

Word 2013 for Windows

Extension Points

Taskpane

APIs

Dialog API 1.1

Shared APIs

BindingEvents
CompressedFile
CustomXmlParts
DocumentEvents
File
HtmlCoercion
ImageCoercion
MatrixBinding
MatrixCoercion
OoxmlCoercion
Settings
TableBindings
TableCoercion
Text File
TextBindings
TextCoercion

Word 2016 for Windows

Extension Points

Taskpane
Add-in Commands

APIs

Word API 1.1
Word API 1.2
Word API 1.3
Dialog API 1.1

Shared APIs

BindingEvents
CompressedFile
CustomXmlParts
DocumentEvents
File
HtmlCoercion
ImageCoercion
Matrix Bindings
MatrixCoercion
OoxmlCoercion
Settings
TableBindings
TableCoercion
Text File
TextBindings
TextCoercion

Note that there is a difference between the MSI installed version or the Office365 version. The MSI version only contains WordApi 1.1. according to the specifications.

Word for iPad

Extension Points

Taskpane

APIs

Word API 1.1
Word API 1.2
Word API 1.3
Dialog API 1.1

Shared APIs

Word 2016 for Mac

Extension Points

Taskpane
Add-in Commands

APIs

Word API 1.1
Word API 1.2
Word API 1.3
Dialog API 1.1

Shared APIs

Word for iPhone

–

Word for Android

–

Word Mobile for Windows 10

–

Observations

So, what do we see here? First observation is that cross platform now means that besides the good old Windows system, additional clients are limited to: “Office Online”, “Office for iPad” and “Office 2016 for Mac”. None of the phone clients have support for add-ins.

A second observation is that all other clients are more or less in par with each other. Only “Office 2013 for Windows” is limited to the DialogApi 1.1 and also none of the WordApis. It also does not support Add-in Commands. This makes you think if you should build your add-ins for Office 2013 or not at all. My guess is that the limitations on this platform are so significant that it would be better to only focus on Office 2016 and up.

Third observation is the missing support for Add-in Commands on Office for iPad. I’m curious to know why this is the case. I thought the iPad also had something like the right click (press and hold for menu) but maybe not. I don’t own an iPad -darn, do I really need to buy one now- so I can’t check this at this time.

Fourth observation is the missing Shared APIs on “Office Online”:

CompressedFile
File
HtmlCoercion
OoxmlCoercion

Maybe these four APIs are just not logical to have in an “Office Online” environment, but that too is a wild guess as I don’t know yet what it is used for.

I’m not sure yet where to go next. We now know what APIs are available for each of the Word Office clients, so I think the next step would be building a starter Add-in for Word 2016 for Windows. This client has the biggest set of APIs supported making me think that this is the best candidate to experiment on and later on see how this fans out to the other clients such as Word Online or the Apple options.

To be continued …

July 30, 2017

Office Development – API Confusion

I started to dive in to the JavaScript API for Office. To get a starting point I started with Word as I’m very familiar with what is there already for VBA and VSTO and will allow me to give me a good starting point to compare.

The first thing you find when you start looking at the JavaScript API for Office is that there are two JavaScript Object models:

· Common APIs

· Host-specific

The Common APIs were introduced with Office 2013 and allows you to connect your add-in application with the Office client application. The object model has Office client specific APIs and APIs that target multiple Office host applications.

This is part of the Shared API and with this API you can interact with the content in Office documents (documents as in Documents, Worksheets, Presentations, Mail Items or Projects). With this API you can target Office 2013 and later. The Shared API is using the common API syntax and the object model used in this API uses callbacks.

Then there are the Host-specific APIs. These APIs were introduced with Office 2016. These APIs provide object models that are host-specific (duh-uh) but more important for stable software development: strongly typed objects that allow you to get some Intellisense in your development toolset.

The different API sets are a bit confusing and the documentation is not all that clear for you to find what is used by what host-application or that is using the Common API. There is a nice overview page that allows you to click on each host application and immediately showing you what API is supported:

Source: https://dev.office.com/add-in-availability

If you click on the details for Outlook for instance there are however Mailbox 1.0 to Mailbox 1.5 in the list but unlike the details for instance for Word or Excel these links are no hyperlinks so you are on your own with this (or maybe there just are no online references?)

Also, the references for Project or Access are not in the list at all. These are linked back to the Office common API requirement sets

I think you agree with me that this doesn’t make it all to clear, especially if you come from VBA or even VSTO. I’m not sure how you could document this better, I need more insights first to think about that. Next target will be to try to understand more about what is used where and when. One thing is relatively clear so far: You need to determine first what your target audience is. The host-specific APIs only target Office 2016 (and up?) to name one … decisions, decisions, decisions.

To be continued …

July 30, 2017

Skip ahead to the next Windows release

It was announced a couple of days ago at the Feedback Hub, but it wasn’t really all that visible. Windows Insiders are now moving into Redstone 4, the successor of the Fall Creators Update.

We are close to getting Redstone 3 aka Fall Creators Update of Windows 10 so this flight (the stream of updates released to Windows Insiders like myself) is currently stabilizing.

If you go to the Settings in Windows 10 you see under Update & Security on the Windows Insider Program tab a new option under What kind of content would you like to receive:

“Skip ahead to the next Windows release”

And the comment that goes with it: “Skip stabilizing our upcoming release and move straight on to our next Windows release”.

There is no option to skip between Slow, Fast or other level:

“Only one level is available for your selected branch”

Switching these options will immediately give you:

If you see 16251.0 you are still on release Redstone 3 (Fall Creators Update) but if you are getting 16251.1000 you are on the next path, Redstone 4 … Let’s move on!

July 28, 2017

Office Development – Add-in Types, what did we have before?

To research the ‘new’ Office JS Add-ins we need to know what types of add-ins there are. If you come from VSTO there is some similarity, add-ins can be divided in different types. Let’s see what we had before.

In VSTO you had the option to create Document Customizations aka Document-level customizations where the add-in was attached to the document or spreadsheet, Application-level customizations, here the add-in lives in the context of the host application like Word or Excel and Outlook Form Regions for customizations in Outlook

Project Type	Feature	Application
Document Level Customization	Actions Pane	Word Excel
	Custom Ribbon UI	Excel InfoPath Outlook PowerPoint Project Word Visio
	Backstage View	Excel InfoPath Outlook PowerPoint Project Word Visio
	Controls on Documents	Excel Word
	Shortcut Menus	Excel InfoPath Outlook PowerPoint Project Word Visio
Application Level Customization	Custom Task Pane	Excel InfoPath Outlook PowerPoint Word
	Custom Ribbon UI	Excel InfoPath Outlook PowerPoint Project Word Visio
	Backstage View	Excel InfoPath Outlook PowerPoint Project Word Visio
	Outlook Form Regions	Outlook
	Controls on Documents	Excel Word
	Shortcut Menus	Excel InfoPath Outlook PowerPoint Project Word Visio

So, in general there are these options explained a bit:

Actions Pane/Task Pane (Depending Application or Document Level)
This is the pane on the right of a document that allows you to interact with the document. In case of an Actions Pane this is attached to the document, while the Task Pane can be there independent of the document. They can both do arbitrary things, but the Actions Pane only appears with the document.
Ribbon UI adjustments
Adding your own Ribbon with controls on it. VSTO can add almost every Ribbon Control available.
Backstage View
Backstage View is the view that you see when you select the File Tab. This allows you to add a special tab in there for whatever you want to show there. Some limitations apply
Outlook Form Regions
Outlook Form Regions extend the way you work with your mail. There are options to just add a small part on top of the mail item or take over the full real estate. You can specify when this happens, will it be only in compose or read mode? You decide.
Controls on Documents
With this feature you can enhance the document with extra controls on top of the document surface. The controls are not always persistent and you may need to re-create the controls each time you open the document if you want them to appear again.
Shortcut Menus
These are the context menus. Right click on the document and add extra function call options within the right-click-menu to allow the user to do specific tasks related to the position of the caret (insertion point where the cursor resides).

This is quite a lot of functionality and also keep in mind that from most of these features you can do the craziest things because you can extend the Task Panes/Action Panes with either Windows Forms but also XAML interfaces. The other features can use the full .NET Framework stack so you can do everything you want.

The challenge is now to see if we can get the same things with Office JS Add-ins. Obviously you don’t want to fall back into a limited feature set. On the other hand, there is the fact that it needs to run on multiple platforms. That can be a limiting factor.

Given this summary I now have a goal to what to look for in the ‘new’ world.

To be continued …

July 27, 2017

SDN Cast 60 – Dotnet demos and more

The week where it was announced that the next version of the current HoloLens will be provided with an embedded AI processor. This important message was explained by Harry Shum, Executive Vice President Artificial Intelligence and Research Group Microsoft, on the CVPR 2017 Computer Vision conference. The already extremely powerful mobile augmented reality computer will become even more powerful and can provide even more realistic Augmented Reality solutions added with extra information about the objects the device will ‘see’ around itself.

Besides the other news (links below) Fanie did another couple (three) demos around the dotnet CLI with dotnet Core and a quick view at the new Azure Container Services. The show is in Dutch, so if you are able to handle that, dive in and see what is going on!

Where can you find our 60^th episode of our Dutch SDN Cast?

https://youtu.be/sMir13ZTtwE

Did you subscribe our Dutch SDN Cast channel already?

Subscribe your YouTube channel if you don’t want to miss a single broadcast. Usually we will broadcast on Thursday evenings at 8 PM but there can be a change of plans where we need to move to another time or day. So to be sure Subscribe to our channel on YouTube or go to http://www.sdncast.nl to see when the next episode is due.

Other news:

Second version of HoloLens HPU will incorporate AI coprocessor for implementing DNNs
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/second-version-hololens-hpu-will-incorporate-ai-coprocessor-implementing-dnns/

What we’ve learned from .NET Core SDK Telemetry
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/07/21/what-weve-learned-from-net-core-sdk-telemetry

TFS 2017 Update 2 RTM
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/07/24/tfs-2017-update-2-rtm/

Profile-guided optimization in .NET Core 2.0
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/07/20/profile-guided-optimization-in-net-core-2-0/

Get Started with F# as a C# developer
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/07/24/get-started-with-f-as-a-c-developer/

.NET Framework July 2017 Preview of Quality Rollup
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/07/24/net-framework-july-2017-preview-of-quality-rollup/

.NET Application Architecture Guidance
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/07/26/the-new-net-application-architecture-guidance/

dotnet sdk list and dotnet sdk latest
https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dotnetSdkListAndDotnetSdkLatest.aspx

Events

This week’s events

CVPR 21-26 July – Honolulu
http://cvpr2017.thecvf.com

Xamarin Dev Days – 22 July – Hengelo
https://ti.to/xamarin/dev-days-hengelo-2017/en

Upcoming events

Agile 2017 – August 7-11 2017, Orlando FL
https://www.agilealliance.org/agile2017/

Wazug – September 7 2017, Hilversum

Microsoft Edge Web Summit 2017 – September 13, Online
https://summit.microsoftedge.com/

Xamarin Dev Days – 16 September – Amsterdam
https://ti.to/xamarin/dev-days-amsterdam-2017

.NET Conf – 19-21 September
http://www.dotnetconf.net/

Microsoft Envision – September 25-27 – Orlando
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/envision/default.aspx

Ignite 2017 – September 25-29 – Orlando
https://ignite.microsoft.com

Hybrid IT Event – September 26 – Maarssen, NL
http://www.fujitsu.com/nl/microsites/hybrid-it/event/index.html

SDN Event 3 – 6 October 6, Zeist, NL
https://www.sdn.nl/EVENTS/6-oktober-2017

TechDays October 12-13, 2017 RAI Amsterdam
http://www.techdays.nl/
https://techdays.msnlevents.net/content/eventselection.aspx?eventid=26152

SharePoint Saturday Belgium 2017, October 21, Brussels BE
http://www.spsevents.org/city/brussels/brussels2017

SharePoint Unite – October 24-26, 2017, Haarlem
https://sharepointunite.com/

Web Summit – 6-9 November 2017, Lisbon, Portugal
https://websummit.com/

Visual Studio Live! November 12-17 2017 Orlando, FL
https://live360events.com/events/orlando-2017/vslive.aspx

As usual we are always looking for presenters for our own events and Meetup’s so if you want to share something about hot technologies or just about something you implemented at work or in an App that could be interesting to our audience let us know so we can schedule you for one or our next SDN events or Dutch .NET Group Meetups.

This off course also goes for if you want to write a great article for us to publish in our SDN Magazines or at our SDN Website. The downside of publishing a magazine article is that there can be some time between writing the article and publishing the magazine. So, if it is time critical sometimes the best option is to publish it on the www.sdn.nl website to get more speedy attention to the article.

As you see, options enough to address your audience with top notch information. You can even, if you like, be our guest in our SDN Cast shows to discuss the projects you are working on or other topics you master. We will instruct you how to connect with us and what it is you need to join the show.

Hopefully we will see you at our weekly web cast, for the schedule go to www.sdncast.nl for next week’s announcement to find out the day and time of our next broadcast or go to www.sdncast.nl/youtube to watch old episodes and videos that we recorded at our events. Don’t forget to subscribe our YouTube channel www.sdncast.nl/subscribe or go directly to YouTube not to miss any of our shows!

July 27, 2017

Office Development–The Good

So after a small introduction to the “Ugly” VBA, the “Bad” VSTO, we end with the “Good” … well end … I guess the end is just the start of a new experience of an Office Development platform not familiar to most people. It is not included in the box like VBA, not using the languages most Microsoft developers are familiar with.

So what is it? Office Add-ins, yes … this time with the capital A, indicating that we discuss the –new- way of developing Office customizations, are built using well known web development technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

By doing so Office Add-ins run across multiple versions of Office:

Office for Windows Desktop
Office Online
Office for the Mac
Office for the iPad

This is most likely not all, with Office emerging on other platforms like Android and Linux distributions these options will be on the shortlist as well. We will research these options on a later time.

So how does this work?

The architecture is a little bit different than the other technologies, although you can debate that the Office Add-ins mechanism looks like the way it was done with VSTO.

This is how it looks like with the JavaScript Office Add-ins:

There is an Add-in manifest in the XML format and a web solution hosted on an arbitrary web server. The image shows HTML + JavaScript but it can be more than that as long as valid web technologies are in place. The manifest contains all sorts of settings (we’ll dive in to see what is in there also later on) and it defines what Office clients are used and what it needs to run.

The Office JavaScript API first implemented some basic Excel features and even less Word features but today many more clients are supported and the Excel and Word features are getting more mature over time. The JavaScript API for Office contains objects and members that you need to build your add-ins and interact with content in your Office documents and web services.

If you look at the API you will see that you recognize a lot of your ‘old’ Office Object Model. Some are close to what they were, others needed to be adjusted and there are also new options.

Ok, the starter is here … in my next posts I will pick each of the items and look at the details. As I said earlier, this for me is probably like you a learning experience. I’ve been looking at it for years now in a helicopter/management overview but I decided I need to learn the ins and outs of the new platform. While doing so I try to teach you as well by blogging about it. Trying to keep it simple and getting more complex over time.

Let’s see if Office Add-ins are really the “Good” as advertised and can they do the same as we can do with VSTO add-ins….

July 25, 2017

Office Development–The Bad

Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) is a set of development tools available in the form of a Visual Studio add-in (project templates) and a runtime that allows Microsoft Office 2003 and later versions of Office applications to host the .NET Framework Common Language Runtime (CLR) to expose their functionality via .NET.

Quote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Studio_Tools_for_Office

As we have seen in my previous blog post Office Development – The Ugly the first option to build your Office extensions using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) did not win the beauty contest. A very powerful toolset to create beautiful and especially productive customizations. I’m sure that VBA, the tools to set Office to your hand, allowing you to tailor Office in a way that it perfectly fits the needs of your company, is one of the main reasons that made Office such a popular box of applications.

It was however risky – a potential security risk and code management is a pain. In the real world it happened that a ‘new’ version was rolled into production where all the sudden existing features ‘disappeared’ as a result of the developer picking the ‘wrong file’ containing an older version of the solution and continued developing features using the incomplete version.

This needed to change … in the meantime managed code -.NET- appeared at the horizon and the next option at least had to be a) secure and b) needed an improved source control option.

The solution Microsoft put on the table were the:

Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System.

The product name was most likely the longest name available at that time. The Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System (VSTO) was architected as a bridge between Visual Studio and The Microsoft Office System. On one side the languages team with Visual Studio, on the other side the Office team and in the middle the VSTO team – code named Trinity …

So how is VSTO different compared to VBA?

Applications, add-ins or document customizations, are built using Visual Studio. Initially in a separate Visual Studio .NET 2003 VSTO SKU and after a few version inserted in the Visual Studio 2008 box. The code no longer lived in the documents or other Office files, but from now on lived in an external assembly that would be triggered by the Office host application if the right properties were available in the document.

Loading the assembly was done in a relative complex manner and it was made sure that security wise the pain seen with VBA would not exist with VSTO add-ins.

Here is a schematic overview of the load pattern:

As you can see the Office Application is looking at the Registry to see what add-ins are installed, if found any the Deployment manifest (pointed to by the Registry) is read and following that the Application manifest is read and the assembly loaded.

A real extension to the Office Application … to make this all secure the security is enforced at installation time. There was a whole slew of prereqs that must be covered before the add-in would be installed:

This part made VSTO the “Bad” in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly … it appeared to be a real pain for the IT Pros at the time. By default, VSTO used Click-Once to install the extension on the machine and a lot went wrong … certificates expired, not added to the Trusted Publisher lists, etc. etc. There was another option, to install an add-in using an .msi installer but the average VBA developer had a hard time getting around all of this, jumping all the hoops to make it work.

Was it all Bad?

Not at all! By using managed code, C# or VB.NET – whatever your preference was, your world of Office completely opened. Whatever you could do with .NET (and that is basically everything) you could add to your solution. Calling third party libraries, UI components, later even XAML UI interfaces, sky is the limit.

For me personally this is still my fav option to build Office customizations. I wasn’t awarded nine-year Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System MVP – I guess the longest MVP title as well, without reason. VSTO controlled my life for the large part of these years (hopefully my wife is not reading this ) did a lot of forum support in this area and built VSTO applications for large enterprise companies. At the time, we still had on Microsoft campus Software Design Review meetings to share feedback and we gave the team a hard time to make sure they released the features that we really needed.

Where to go next

But … the world changed, Windows is no longer the only platform that needs to be supported. Because of that a new mechanism was proposed. By using the common web standards and JavaScript a platform independent system was developed by providing OfficeJS APIs to access the Office object model from web based add-ins.

And this is where we will dive in soon. It’s a relative new world, although development already started years ago, so there is a lot to learn there. Let’s see if we can do the same with OfficeJS as we can do with VSTO – but now on multiple platforms and several clients.

Maybe I will return to VBA and VSTO in separate blog posts just for fun. There is just a ton of information to share on all off these areas.

Book

Oh, and if you really want to know the ins and outs of VSTO I really recommend you reading the VSTO bibles by Eric Carter and Eric Lippert: Visual Studio Tools for Office 2007: VSTO for Excel, Word and Outlook. It is a huge and heavy piece of reference with over a thousand pages of inside information.

July 24, 2017

Office Development – The Ugly

In the short introduction in my previous post “Office Development–The Good, The Bad and The Ugly?” I was showing three of the main options to build Office add-ins (again I will use Office Add-ins with the capital A to indicate talking about the ‘new’ Office JS Add-ins as opposed to add-ins in general). In this post, I’m now going into the first of each of the options a bit: how to start and where to look for things.

The first option is Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). If you go back a long time, like I do, this was about your first option to customize your Office environment. None of the other options were around at the time. VBA is hosted within the individual host applications such as Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel or even some other applications not limited Microsoft to but licensed by Microsoft to these other vendors.

Disabled by default

Straight out of the box you need to activate the option to be able to use VBA from the host application. In this case Word, you need to go into the File menu option, select Customize Ribbon and tick the option on the right under Main Tabs called “Developer”.

After activating the option you will notice that the “Developer” Tab becomes visible:

By selecting the tab, you’ll see options like “Visual Basic”, “Macros”, “Record Macro” and more.

Entering your first code

Ok, now it’s time to enter your first VBA code … we won’t be creating the good old “Hello World” but it sure comes close. Click the “Visual Basic” button to open the VBA Integrated Development Environment (IDE) the environment where you build and (test)run your application.

Let’s dive in now … open the VBA IDE as explained above, and enter the following lines:

Sub test()

Dim DefinedVariable As String
UndefinedVariable = “test”
MsgBox DefinedVariable

End Sub

Like this:

Running the code with function key F5 or stepping into the code with F8 until End Sub (the yellow line) you will see that Word is showing an empty dialog box where you expected the word “test” to appear if all variables were used correctly:

The Ugly I

You will notice that I defined the variable “DefinedVariable” but I initialized the variable “UndefinedVariable” with the value of “test”. I did this to show you the first “Ugly” in VBA … Although you won’t get an error your application will show an unexpected result (well … if the mistake was made in real life)

What happened here is that VBA didn’t throw an error as you are perfectly allowed to initialize an undefined variable (the one called UndefinedVariable in the code) but you’ll find that the variable was displayed that you did not initialize, called DefinedVariable.

This, especially in larger applications will cause extremely unexpected results and if the variables just look alike it will take you hours to notice that you made a typo somewhere.

To avoid these issues “Option Explicit” was invented. By adding the line, VBA requires you to define all variables used in your application. So, if you use this and runs the code your will now see that an exception will be thrown to point out that you missed something here:

Where is your code stored?

You built your first application, but you wonder … where is it stored. Well that is both the beauty and evil thing about VBA, it travels with the document (template, workbook, presentation … depending on your host application). The beauty because it is very easy to distribute, you just share the document, if it is about Word, to another person in your organization and they can run it. That is also -the risk- of being able to just share it, shady virus writers realized this and used it as a vehicle to spread their viruses in a fairly easy manner. Microsoft tried to solve this issue a little bit by differentiating between file naming. Documents containing VBA code are using extensions with an m like document.docm while ‘plain’ no code documents are named document.docx. It is good to know though, that the old extension .doc still exists.

The Ugly II

Lack of security and the risk of writing faulty code makes VBA the “Ugly” one of the three options. You are perfectly capable of creating the best and most intelligent tools using VBA and there have been some great examples that boosted productivity but it is just not “Enterprise” ready. It is hard to control and can cause a large impact on your support division within your company.

So, should you use it? Of course, you can use it whenever you feel it will help you being productive! I still use it myself … if I need to create some quick ‘n dirty solutions to avoid repetition in my “task for the day” it is really easy to record a few lines of code, edit it to fit your needs and run it.

I deliberately didn’t go into details of the VBA language. The reason for that is that I just wanted to provide a primer showing the three development options and my goal will be to dive into the “Good” (as considered today) option. If your want to know how to proceed with VBA I suggest you dive into the documentation behind the links below or find some introduction sites. The benefit of a toolset that has been around for such a long time is that there is a boatload of information available on the interwebs to get you started. This post is merely an introduction as part of the big picture called “Office Development” or as I called it “Office Development 2017”.

Documentation

https://msdn.microsoft.com/VBA/VBA-Language-Reference

Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_for_Applications

July 23, 2017

SDN Event – Fanie Reynders – IOT and Build Server (Raspberry PI and VSTS)

The last recording in our series of SDN Event recordings that we publish from our 23^rd of June SDN Event. This is the session by Fanie Reynders. Interaction with VSTS and a Raspberry PI in this recording called “IOT and Build Server (Raspberry PI and VSTS)” will show you a sample of what you can do with IOT today.

Abstract

Tired of the endless alerts spamming your team channels (especially e-mail) about the status of failed and successful builds? In this session, we are going to make use of Azure Functions, your favorite source-code repo (like VSTS) and a Raspberry Pi to create a simple lamp indicating the status of your builds on each check-in. Learn about how you can connect events driven from the cloud to the physical world using awesome tools available right now.

Fanie builds an application, loads it on the Raspberry PI and all of this in a session packed with code, explaining how to interact with the small IOT devices in a real life working demo! Well wa’do you know!

SDN Event – Fanie Reynders – IOT and Build Server (Raspberry PI and VSTS)

Recordings previously released from the 23^rd of June SDN Event.

If you missed the previous recording that we published the last couple of weeks you can still dive in and watch the sessions here online. Oh, and don’t forget to subscribe:

SDN Event – Brady Gaster – Developing for Azure on a Mac

SDN Event – Richard Campbell – Saving The World One App at a Time

SDN Event – Brady Gaster – Getting Started building Visual Studio Code Extensions

SDN Event – Richard Campbell – Keynote: The Development Platform Landscape in 2017

July 22, 2017

Office Development–The Good, The Bad and The Ugly?

In my last post we’ve seen that there are just a whole list of options covered under Office Development. Just to get a starting point we start to focus on Office add-ins –without the capital A– first. With Office add-ins I mean Office add-ins in general, that is … from the early start to where we are today.

I know that these days the name Office Add-ins is considered to be the part where Office Add-ins are built using the OfficeJS APIs but in the early years you had Office add-ins in many forms and technologies.

The Ugly

Initially the only option to customize Office was by adding code using Microsoft’s Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). This was, or should I say is – it still exists and you can still use it, the embedded code engine running a subset of the full Visual Basic command set capable in addressing the Office Object Model to quickly build some Office automation functions to make life as an Office Worker easier. The language appeared to be very powerful and in the real world people built some crazy complex stuff with it.

The Bad

To add more structure to building Office add-ins a new development paradigm was developed. Still using the Office Object Model but this time using the managed languages such as VB.NET or C Sharp (C#).

Managing code with VBA could be a pain in the … Code traveled with the documents and when the document was copied another ‘branch’ was created and you would never know you were working on the latest version unless you managed your distributions very strictly. Also the declaration of variables wasn’t always enforced causing all sorts of runtime errors to surface just after releasing the production code.

By using this new way to build your Office add-ins or customizations (I will return on customizations vs. add-ins later in a separate blog post, that’s a story on itself) with the new tools: Microsoft’s “Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System” (VSTO) at least you had a better control over your source code and you could even use Source Control to keep track of your code versions.

With this, the first versions of VSTO, seemed to be very hard when it came to installing the add-ins. Security was improved a lot, but that came at the high price of tough installation issues.

The Good

In these days, deploying add-ins can’t be limited to the Windows Platform so another change was rising … these are the add-ins built using the combination of well known web technologies and by including a Manifest you are now able to run your Office Add-ins (with the capital A) on all platforms in all supported and still growing number of client applications. Currently the client applications are Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Word and recently added Project, Access and OneNote.

Really?

Are these three technologies really The Good, The Bad and The Ugly? Well no, obviously not, you can still build add-ins in all three of these technologies but VBA for instance always had a very bad name, also caused by virus developers using this technology to harm innocent computer users by exploiting the technology to take over the computer and in worst case disable it.

VSTO was considered to be a real improvement but this technology also had his downsides. Deployment could be really hard, but this improved in later versions. Still going multi platform was no option for VSTO.

So is all good with the OfficeJS add-ins? Again, not at all … for starters these technologies used here are in general very hard to understand when you come from the VBA or managed code languages. Also, the APIs are not fully completed.

It still isn’t possible to do all the things that you could do with VSTO. With VSTO there is not really a limit. Whatever you can do with managed code you can do with VSTO as it just is interfacing between Office and .NET. This of course in itself could be very dangerous and should be managed to the max. Also VSTO is used by shady guys building malicious code.

We will get more in detail (we are still diving in, going deeper and deeper at this time) in my following blog posts so subscribe and join me in this adventure called Office Development!

Word Online

Extension Points

APIs

Shared APIs

Word 2013 for Windows

Extension Points

APIs

Shared APIs

Word 2016 for Windows

Extension Points

APIs

Shared APIs

Word for iPad

Extension Points

APIs

Shared APIs

Word 2016 for Mac

Extension Points

APIs

Shared APIs

Word for iPhone

Word for Android

Word Mobile for Windows 10

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