Tag: Office Development

Posted on

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 Not easy as what you learn today is outdated tomorrow, but boy … the things you can do in code these days are absolutely amazing!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:

https://twitch.tv/MaartenVanStam

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?

Posted on

Office Development – Live Coding

SDN Cast - Live Coding - Office Development 1

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:

https://maartenvanstam.wordpress.com/2017/07/20/office-development-2017/

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)

SDN Cast - Live Coding - Office Development 1 YouTube 

You can find the recording of my first Live Coding session here on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/edit?video_id=QivUh9Kyyos

Also you can find another recording on Twitch:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/371899703##

If you want to follow our Live Coding events (and other SDN Cast webcasts) make sure you subscribe on YouTube or follow me on Twitch!

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 Smile) 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 Winking smile.

Hope to see you in our next Live Coding sesions!

Posted on

2018 Just started – Happy New Year

Blog 2018

A lot happened in 2017 on all levels …

Marcel Meijer, Fanie Reynders and I did our weekly SDN Cast again for the second year already. We only skipped a few weeks to attend some large conferences and create some impressions of the events. You can find all the videos on our YouTube channel: www.sdncast.nl/youtube (or direct link: www.youtube.com/sdncast).

I was awarded MVP for the 13th time in 2017, in fact twice for 2017 – once in January 2017 and ‘automagically’ renewed in July 2017 due to a change in the MVP Program cycles. Instead of 4 quarterly cycles to be renewed once a year the award cycle changed to July for everyone.

So for me for the first time since 2007 (as I was awarded in January of 2016) a New Years Day without the suspense of being renewed or not to be renewed. In 2018 the thrill is shifted to July so we’ll see what happens by then Smile.

Besides all of this we did three SDN Events (one day conference) an Office 365 Developer Bootcamp to teach Microsoft Teams development to a nice group of local developers (The Office Developer Bootcamp was a global initiative where everywhere in the world groups of people organized local Bootcamp events. Our Bootcamp was in Amsterdam last November).

But there was more … Dutch .NET Group Meetups, Build Conference, TechDays NL, Community MVP Event in Denmark and not to forget another year of great technologies!

Anyway … there happened too much to list here so that only leaves me to wishing you all the best for 2018 with many more events like we’ve seen in 2017!

The show must go on …

Posted on

SDN Event: Bill Ayers – Welcome to the Brave New World of SharePoint and Office 365 Development!

BillAyersI800

Second session in our series of October SDN Event recordings we released the first presentation by Bill Ayers from the event where he informs you about the evolution of SharePoint and Office 365 Development and where we are today with regards to these products.

Where to find:

https://youtu.be/MIGySwrI6tg

Abstract:

If your software development journey ever took you into the dark misty forest that is SharePoint development, there are two possibilities: you became a SharePoint developer or (more likely) you vowed never to go there again because of the dragons. But the forest is changing, the dragons are slain (mostly), and there is a new world of SharePoint and Office 365 development. Instead of building full-trust solutions that run in-process on the SharePoint server, we are moving to a model of client-side or remote-server development using a variety of technologies. Starting with SharePoint 2013 and Office 365 we have REST endpoints to support the rich client-side solutions our users want. In this talk we are going to see how far we can go using JavaScript and client-side development for Windows, web and mobile applications, and using ASP.NET MVC and other web development platforms. It’s time to take another look at SharePoint and Office 365 development. We can build sophisticated solutions that take advantage of the powerful back-end services that deliver business solutions through websites, desktop or mobile applications.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube Channel so you won’t miss the next sessions that we are about to post soon!
https://www.sdncast.nl/subscribe

Posted on

SDN Cast 66 – XlPublish with Mr. Moffat and Mr. Hoppe

SDNCast 66-800

Today we had our 66th SDN Cast, our 100th published video. Today with Mr. Moffat and Mr. Hoppe showing their new Excel tool XlPublish an Add-In for Microsoft Excel to better integrate Excel data and Microsoft’s Power BI’s Dashboarding product and make it available to every Excel user everywhere.

Usually the SDN Cast in Dutch but today the webcast is in English as Dick Moffat is from the other half of the globe from Canada. My connection was a bit crappy this time, probably my family was busy streaming Netflix eating all the bandwidth instead of watching daddy in his webcast Confused smile.

XlPublish is a very interesting product, making your work as Power BI person a lot easier if you have your data in Excel or even in external data that you can expose through Excel!

Where can you find our 66th episode of our SDN Cast?
https://youtu.be/KE6bhvdLLnI

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

Announcing TypeScript 2.5
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/typescript/2017/08/31/announcing-typescript-2-5/

Events

Events this Week

Google Developer Days Europe – September 5-6, Krakow, Poland
https://developers.google.com/events/gdd-europe/

Wazug – September 7 2017, Hilversum
https://www.wazug.nl/Event/Details/2059

Upcoming Events

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

MixUG – Development Event – 13 September, Gouda
https://www.eventbrite.nl/e/tickets-mixug-development-evenement-34890959800

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

DevIntersection Europe, September 18-20 – Stockholm
https://www.devintersectioneurope.com/#!

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

Building high performance web applications with Preact – September 21th- .NET Zuid – Rotterdam
http://www.dotnetzuid.nl/Meeting/20/building-high-performance-web-applications-with-preact

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
https://myignite.microsoft.com/sessions

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

4DotNet Events – Xamarin Event – 28 September, Nieuwegein
https://events.4dotnet.nl/xamarin-event

MixUG – Eindgebruikers Evenement
https://www.eventbrite.nl/e/tickets-mixug-eindgebruikers-evenement-34890983872

SDN Event 3 – 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/

Dev Intersection, October 30- November 2, Las Vegas
https://www.devintersection.com/#!/

Firebase Dev Summit – Amsterdam – October 31
https://firebase.google.com/dev-summit-17/

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 sometime 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!

Posted on

Office Development–How to reach the Office Extensibility Platform team

StackOverflow

A long time ago, I answered a lot of questions in the so called Microsoft Forums assisting the community with VSTO issues. The forums still exist (https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/home?forum=vsto), but are not the main access point anymore if you want to reach the Office Extensibility Platform team with your questions or issues.

These days https://www.stackoverflow.com is the center of the Universe (well… not really but if you have developer related questions it is … sort of …).

StackOverflow is a huge knowledge base of information formed out of an even bigger stack of questions from the community answered by not only the community but also from many of the ‘real’ product groups. If you are building your Add-ins using OfficeJS your can go to:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/office-js

This “office-js” tagged group of questions is actively monitored by the Office Extensibility Platform team and you might recognize many of the team members as being the ones answering your questions (or apologizing if you reached an issue). By asking your questions in there the information around it is automatically functioning as future reference item.

You’ll notice, if you Google for a specific issue or question, that you’ll hit StackOverflow simply because you often won’t be the only one with that question. Big chance that the answer is already available and that will save you the time to submit the question.

Remember, that by submitting your question, you are not only helping yourself but you’ll help many others arriving at a later time with the same question.

And … while you are at it, try to answer some of the open questions if you know the answer. It will provide you ‘reputation’ points that may help you even more. The more reputation points you get the more you are ‘credited’ with features. If your reputation is high enough you’ll be able to moderate questions with a group of peer moderators, and if it is really high you can moderate without confirmation of other moderators. You basically build trust by doing good.

BTW, the office-js tag is not the only tag where the team lives, other examples and my favorite tags:

image

Note that VSTO is also in there:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/vsto
so if you have questions on the good old VSTO tools this is your go to place Winking smile

Posted on

Office Development – SharePoint Framework Extensions now RC0

Office Development - SharePoint Extensions RC0

In June I blogged about the SharePoint Framework Extensions Developer Preview and last night the SharePoint Framework Extensions moved a step forward, they are now available as Release Candidate 0:

https://dev.office.com/blogs/sharepoint-framework-extensions-rc0-now-available

Not completely ready so to say, my guess there will be at least two more RCs but at least they moved out of Preview.

If you don’t know what the SharePoint Framework Extensions are, just jump back to my June post to read all about it.

Have Fun!

Posted on

Office Development – Word Add-in in Visual Studio ‘in action’

Yesterday in my blogpost I showed you the instructions to perform to create your first Word Add-in not by command line tools like I showed earlier, but by using Visual Studio 2017. So here it is:

Boot up your Visual Studio IDE and select File, new Project. In the New Project Dialog select on the left hand of the dialog the tree item Add-ins under the Office/SharePoint node. On the right hand you get options to build Add-ins for Excel, Word, Outlook, PowerPoint and SharePoint.

 FirstVSAddin01

They still call it Web Add-in, if you ask me this name is a bit outdated. I believe the Add-ins are called just Office Add-ins (with the capital A). There was a time these things were called “Apps for Office”. The name used today on the http://dev.office.com website is:

Apps for Office

Where were we? …. Oh, yes … Creating a new project. Name your new project any name you would like to give it, I opted for MyFirstWordAddin. Change the folder if you want to store it somewhere else other than the default project output path and click OK to start creating your project. If all goes well you’ll see the following ‘progress’ bar appearing on your screen.

FirstVSAddin02

It takes a couple of minutes to finish, but when it does it will open a code window like this:

FirstVSAddin03

And another tab was created to show you some helpful links to continue:

FirstVSAddin04

Now it is time to hit F5, the “Visual Studio Compile-Run-Debug Experience”. As we have seen ancient times ago the Office Dev team really tried to hide all the difficult stuff for you and it will create for you the security context to be able to actually run the Word Add-in without going through the hassle I described in other posts creating the Add-in using the command line tools like Yeomen.

The only dialog might get to see in between is this one:

Cert1

A one time only trust entry for your self-signed Localhost certificate. You’ll notice if you create a second project this dialog won’t show again as you already trusted it for your first project. Click Yes otherwise your Add-in won’t be trusted to run. It will create the security context and an instance of Word is created and installed the just created Add-in.

On the top right hand in the Ribbon in the Home Tab a button appears in the Commands Group with some easy instructions. You’ve seen as similar button and instructions on the command line Add-in we created a while ago.

FirstVSAddin05

Click the button to have the Task pane appearing on the right hand. The sample Task pane wants you to select a couple of words in the document and if you press the Highlight button it will calculate the word with the most characters and highlights the word.

FirstVSAddin06

That is all there is to it … no fancy pansy difficult stuff to get around creating certificates and trusting the certificates. It is all done for you by the Visual Studio tooling. Impressive!

Beware however, you are not ready for production – just like the command line Add-in tools, the certificate is self signed, you are not running the ‘ web app’ in a shared (public) location to be able to access from anywhere and anytime. It is still ‘demo-ware’. Hopefully over time we will reach the golden moment of creating ‘production-ware’ Smile

To be continued …

 

 

 

Posted on

Office Development – Word Add-in – Using Visual Studio

Office Development - Visual Studio

A while ago, not too long, I showed you how to start developing your Word Add-in from scratch using nothing but command line tools. Check my blog archives for the last couple of weeks if you missed that. Today we are looking at the same process but now using Visual Studio.

Where to begin? According to the page: https://dev.office.com/getting-started/addins going through the process of steps you select Word as Add-in host, and Visual Studio as tools to build your Add-in will finally show you the following screen:

image

It is already hopelessly outdated, mentioning to install the Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2013 or 2015 while Visual Studio 2017 has been around for quite some time.

The process however is still unchanged for the most part, I will show it in practice in a later blog, but if you follow the three steps you are basically already there, where without Visual Studio and just using the command line tools we had to go through a large series of requirements and certificate fixes to make that work.

Apparently Visual Studio takes a lot of this out of your hands and is doing all that for you. Not completely fair, because with Visual Studio you also need to go through the installation process. I want to find out what this all is and put that in a blog post as well

To be continued …

Posted on

Office Development – Book: Building Office Add-ins using Office.js

clip_image002

While looking for references and/or resources to support my research on the ‘new’ Office Add-ins I repeatedly stumbled over the sample chapters of one book in particular:

Building Office Add-ins using Office.js

https://leanpub.com/buildingofficeaddins

The book is published on LeanPub and this means that it is work in progress. The author is continuously working on the manuscript and is potentially never finished. Even the pricing is flexible, the author specified a minimum and a recommended fee. You can decide if you want to pay the minimum, recommended or even a higher amount for the book. At this time, the minimum is set to $15.99 and the suggested price is set to $19.99 but as said you can up the price to $500 if you like Smile

clip_image004

You don’t have to worry the information provided is legit, the book is written by Michael Zlatkovsky who works at the Office Extensibility Platform team at Microsoft. The information is therefor right from the source, even better … Michael has been a key participant in the design of the new Office 2016 wave of Office.js APIs:

https://leanpub.com/u/Zlatkovsky

Michael and I go back quite some time already, I met Michael years ago, I thinks around 2012, when we were all still developing VSTO Add-ins. Michael always was very helpful and supporting when I needed information or struggled with issues.

Now get on over to LeanPub site and buy the book!

Did I mention already where to get it?
https://leanpub.com/buildingofficeaddins

I’m sure it will help you and me in learning the details of developing Office Add-ins using Office.js