Tag: VSTO

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Office Development – Live Coding

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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)

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Another year, another MVP Award

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The first of January I was (again) awarded  MVP, for the 12th year already. After a bit of a roundtrip I returned back on my ‘home base’ with the award category of “Office Development”. Initially I was awarded MVP “Visual Studio Tools for the Office System” (I know, what is in a name?) in 2006 and was able to hold on to that for nine years. VSTO however went on maintenance mode and the category was merged into the .NET and Office365 expertises. I work with both, a lot, but was sitting somewhat closer to the Office Team and was moved into the Office365 award category the year after.

Due to complete reorganizations within the MVP Program Group the year after moving to Office365 the category moved again! This time the category was part of an even larger group, Office Servers and Services. VSTO was really a small group of about twenty MVPs, maybe less, Office 365 was huge and Office Servers and Services was bigger than huge. Office development was somehow lost in transition and Microsoft also realized there was a gap in that area and introduced the new Office Development award category and I was happy to find out that I returned ‘home’ by receiving MVP award number twelve in the Office Development category.

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Even after so many years of Office Development, there are still exciting things going on with the Office developer platform. Office JS is getting more and more mature over time and the team is really working hard to get the interfaces in par with what was there on the Windows platform in order to be able to run all equally on all platforms such as iOS, Android but obviously also on Windows.

Let’s see what 2017 brings on Office Development, Stay tuned and thanks all for giving me the 12th MVP Award!

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Happy wishes and some Office predictions for 2016

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Another year has gone, a new year started … this is 2016. Welcome!

My year, for the eleventh time already, started with receiving the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award again.

After nine years of receiving the award for Visual Studio Tools for the Office System (VSTO), one year of Office365 I now, after the award update, received the award in the award category “Office Servers and Services”. This is where all former Office365, Exchange, SharePoint, Skype for Business and Yammer are grouped today. As of October 2015 the MVP Award categories have changed, there are now less categories and in theory you can get the MVP Award in multiple categories.

So what will bring 2016 to you and me? Well nobody knows… so I don’t know either, but let’s see if we can make some educated guesses here.

2015 was the year Office Microsoft released some early updates on the Office 365 APIs. Starting with the outer ring of Office365 we got access to files, contacts and much more. Access to the documents itself (the structure of the document, in VBA the Object Model) was fairly limited.

In 2016 I expect to see much more APIs providing access to the Office document model. This will give you the functionality, but now cross-platform, like you used to see with VBA, COM-Addins and in VSTA/VSTO solutions.

Let’s see how the Office365 APIs progresses in the year of 2016. Join me in the process of learning the ‘modern’ ways of developing Office solutions on x-plat. Keep an eye on my blog …

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