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OBAs and Pizza

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I'm back from TechEd EMEA in Barcelona and I was really glad to see all the excitement out there around Office 2007. The one thing that did surprise me was all the confusion surrounding Office Business Applications. I agree, the name is a tad cryptic, but even after explaining that "OBAs" are enterprise business solutions that you build on Office 2007, developers would still ask where they could get one rather then how they could build one.

 Do you find the term "Office Business Applications" confusing? Tell me why...

From conversations with some of you, I heard that as developers, you want to see everything from "More code! More integration with VS!" to "Give me a GUI to edit XML files!". Working with Office is great that way. As Sinofsky says, "Making Office is like ordering pizza for 400 million people".

This brings me to a little discussion on tools. In this version of Office, we made sure to rip ourselves away from all those proprietary tools we've tended to stick to in the past (i.e. SharePoint Web Part Framework for creating web parts rather than ASP.NET 1.0). Office 2007 development is now based on tools you probably already know. Here's a quick list:

ASP.NET 2.0 - SharePoint web parts, master pages

XML - new file format, ribbon customization

xslt transforms - control presentation of search results

managed code - customized workflow, custom task panes, ribbon call backs, integration with Visual Studio extensions for WSS 3.0, Visusal Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System Second Edition and lots more

Stay tuned next time for when I'll deconstruct the custom ribbon portion of my TechEd demo.

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