Need Help?
Over the past few weeks while enjoying the summer weather here in Seattle (finally!), I've been busy fly fishing and preparing for a new puppy. I'm not really good at either and so I've been spending a lot of time looking through resources trying to get better. This has got me thinking about the next blog post I should write (ironically enoughJ). There's a lot to learn with all of the new products, servers and services in Office 2007. In fact, this is our biggest release of Office ever. So to help you all out, I thought I'd share my favorites:
Microsoft Office Interactive Developer Map:
Built on WPF, the great part about this is that it is completely interactive. If you want to dive deeper into a product or technology, you just click on the area and you get links to the dev features on MSDN, key namespaces, list of reference documentation, community resources and more. It's really an awesome resource. Here's a screenshot:
And here's an example of what it looks like when you click on Excel Services, for example:
You can download the Interactive Developer Map from here.
OBA Sites:
Right out of the oven, we have www.obaCentral.com and also www.msdn.microsoft.com/oba.
Other Office 2007 Sites:
Office Developer How-To Center – My favorite site to learn how to extend Office 2007 with a variety of tools and technologies. Provides short videos, articles and code snippets.
VSTO 2005 SE Page on the VSTO Developer Portal
Office SharePoint Server 2007 SDK
Office Learning Portal: Free training, e-learning, books and skills assessments
Blogs:
Building Office Business Applications:
https://blogs.msdn.com/rbarker/
https://blogs.msdn.com/javeds/
VS extensions for SharePoint and SharePoint Designer:
https://blogs.msdn.com/alexma/
Visual Studio Tools for Office: https://blogs.msdn.com/vsto2/
Open XML File Formats:
https://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/
https://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/
https://blogs.infosupport.com/wouterv/
SharePoint Products and Technologies: https://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/
https://blogs.msdn.com/mikefitz/
https://www.u2u.info/Blogs/Patrick/default.aspx
Outlook Programmability: https://blogs.msdn.com/rgregg/
Access: https://blogs.msdn.com/access/
InfoPath: https://blogs.msdn.com/InfoPath/
Excel: https://blogs.msdn.com/excel/
New User Interface: https://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/
Office Developer: https://blogs.msdn.com/erikaehrli/
Books:
Inside Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 by Patrick Tisseghem
Inside Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 by Ted Pattison
Microsoft SharePoint: Building Office 2007 Solutions in C# 2005 by Scot Hillier
VSTO for Mere Mortals by Kathleen McGrath and Paul Stubbs
Pro SharePoint Solution Development: Combining .NET, SharePoint and Office 2007 by Ed Hild
Good luck researching and let me know how it goes.