This is about Add-In Development
Outlook Add-In development is brilliantly simple with the right tools. Visual
Studio has some awesome features, such as support for LINQ, improved web
development, and tighter integration with Vista® and SharePoint®, to name just a
few. One area where Visual Studio 2008 really stands out, though, is in it's
support for Microsoft® Office Solutions development.
VSTO 3.0 provides a Windows Forms-based design environment in Visual Studio 2008.
This allows you to design and code the new Outlook form regions in one
development environment and brings many advantages of Windows Forms to the
hosting environment of Outlook. For example, you can create a VSTO form region
that connects to a Web service to acquire customer relationship management (CRM)
data and display it in a grid. You can even add a custom Ribbon to an Outlook
2007 inspector that will host the custom form region and add code to the Ribbon
so that it interacts with the controls on the region.
Office Business Applications are an emerging class of application that helps
businesses unlock the value of their line-of-business (LOB) systems and turn
document-based processes into real applications. OBAs leverage the power of the
Office Business Platform, that is, the clients, servers, services, and tools
that comprise the 2007 Microsoft Office system to solve business problems.
People typically perform significant additional work outside of the formal
processes of a line-of-business (LOB) system as they collaborate with other
people via phone and email, obtain information from multiple sources in the form
of documents and spreadsheets, and switch between online and offline modes for
meetings and business trips. OBAs help simplify this interaction by fitting
within the informal processes that information workers actually follow.
Applications and documents can be extended to add enterprise-specific features,
and LOB systems can be seamlessly integrated with the Microsoft Office system to
make the LOB system much more accessible.
The Theme is SaaS
Let’s face it. Development today is about connecting disparate systems and
adhering to open standards. Developers today are being asked to do a lot. Take a
simple example, like a hospital clerk, who processes incoming email to validate
prescription fulfillment requests. Wouldn’t it be great if the clerk could just
perform a patient lookup directly from within the email message body? The demos
I have created demonstrate how this can be done. WCF services and LINQ make
almost any data available to any client, whether that client is a web
application, an Office Ribbon application, or a workflow automation application
(Windows Workflow Foundation).
What you can do right now – Writing Powerful Extensions To Outlook
You can immediately start creating applications around Office 2007. I’ve created
over 25 very efficient videos that show you:
• How to create a interactive user interface with the “Ribbon.” The Ribbon is an extremely
powerful container for your own custom extensions to Office. Imagine learning
how to give your users the ability to type look.
• How to search for information in other data stores right from within the comfort of an
Outlook email message.
• Learn how to embed extremely graphical user interfaces extensions to an email message.
Outlook Form Regions allow developers to inject custom user interfaces right
into the message body of an email message. For example, you could perform a
lookup against SQL Server, SAP, and some human resources database. LINQ allows
you to integrate XML data vary easily and integrate XML data seamlessly with
relational data.
• Learn how to integrate highly graphical Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) forms in
your menus added to any Office application.
• Learn how to create WCF Services that integrate with stored procedures in SQL Server.
Learn the techniques of distributed computing, LINQ queries, service oriented
architectures.