Tag: VBA

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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!

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Office Development – Where to Start

Office Development – Where to Start

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Starting at dev.office.com you see a wide variety of options related to Office Development. There are a couple of sections to identify when you enter the Getting Started entry

  • Microsoft Graph
  • SharePoint Add-ins
  • Office Add-ins
  • Office 365 Connectors

Apparently, this is not all, as below the four options there is another option:

Can’t find what you’re looking for? Check out this full list of all development options for Office linking to the URL https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office. If you follow this URL you’ll notice that it is redirected to, you might have guessed it: https://dev.office.com/docs, the documentation part of dev.office.com.

Here the options are not limited to the options above but now you can see there are sections for:

  • Microsoft Graph
  • Office Add-ins
  • Office 365 Connectors

And below this

  • Office Clients
  • Outlook.com
  • OneNote
  • SharePoint
  • OneDrive
  • Yammer
  • Exchange
  • Skype

Wait …, what …, why is there a section Office Clients separated from the Office Add-ins?

Well, I don’t know. Looking at this it you might think the ‘older technologies’ are under the ‘subsections’. This is true for Office Clients, covering:

  • Office 2013
  • Office 2010
  • Visual Basic Reference

The last item in the list is in fact incorrect, and should have been called “Visual Basic for Applications Reference” or “VBA Reference” or even better “Language Reference VBA” as it redirects to Language reference VBA. It has nothing to do with Visual Basic. Sure Visual Basic resembles a lot compared to Visual Basic for Applications (I will reference to VBA from now on for Visual Basic for Applications) but it isn’t the same. It’s as if you compare Visual Basic to VB.NET they aren’t the same either.

To continue the ‘older technologies’ theory … under SharePoint you find:

  • SharePoint Framework
  • SharePoint WebHooks
  • SharePoint Add-ins
  • SharePoint 2013
  • SharePoint 2010

In this case you see a combination of older and newer technologies. Also under the other subsections you find a mix of newer and older technologies (Exchange) or just newer technologies (Outlook.com, OneDrive, Skype, OneNote and Yammer).

There are even parts missing on this part of the documentation. What about Microsoft Teams as a newer application of Office or existing applications like Microsoft Access. Office and therefor Office Development is just huge, we can spend so much time on these sections, there is no end in all of this.

To start the research, I first want to focus on the Office Clients and their Add-ins. The reason for this is that this was the part that was applied the most when you look at Office customization (adjusting the Office client applications in a way that it suited the needs of the productivity workers).

So, I will drill down from the part covered under Office Clients and move over from there to the section Office Add-ins. This will provide a sense of history and slowly move into the newer technologies as provided in the OfficeJS APIs.

Enough stuff to dig in, so hang in there … see you in my next blogpost(s)