Publisher Object Model Overview Article Now Live on MSDN

Yesterday saw the publication of my penultimate article on Publisher 2003, 7 Things Developers Should Know About the Publisher 2003 Object Model, Part 1. If you're an Office developer new to the Publisher object model (or new to Publisher in general), this article and its sequel aim to give you a quick overview of the unique aspects of the Publisher developer story.

These articles grew out of the fact that I was handing off the responsibility for Publisher developer documentation to another programmer-writer for the Office "12" release. As part of the transition, I had thought of a handful of areas where Publisher functionality or the object model was unique enough to require some explanation, even to the experienced programmer-writer taking my place. I wrote up a few of these areas on this blog (here, here, and here), then decided to turn the whole thing into an MSDN article. Which naturally became two.

Part 1 covers the following areas:

· General object model structure

· The ThisDocument object

· Commercial Printing Support in the object model

· Catalog and mail merge

While Part 2, most likely to be published next week, tackles these topics:

· Wizards and templates

· Web pages

· Stories and linked text boxes

I actually wrote these articles a few months back, but for various publishing reasons they're only now seeing the light of day. (My editor told me they were holding off publishing them in order to not overshadow the release of Harry Potter VI. I can see that.)