Gray Matter

On Brian Jones' blog today, Zeyad Rajabi has posted the source code for the Custom XML Markup Detection tool from my last post. This should give readers a bit more insight into what it is looking for to identify affected documents.

The source is provided to you as an example of the Open XML SDK's incredible utility and power, but also for you to customize the tool for the purpose of scanning other areas of documents or to implement the scanning or reporting activities differently.

After we made a patch available for Word related to the recent court ruling, we were asked by a handful of customers if there is a way to identify document files or solutions which may be affected. One way to identify solutions within an organization that may be affected is to scan your existing XML format based Word files (.docx and .docm) for the presence of the markup in question.

On my blog today I am posting a no-cost, unsupported tool to help you scan repositories for documents which may contain markup that would be affected by the patch. We are also providing the source code for the tool in case you would want to modify it to scan for specific directories, or to add additional functionality to the tool. It is written in C#.

Results provided by the tool can help you to identify possible areas of impact for your specific IT environment.

The documents identified by the tool as containing custom XML markup are themselves not affected by the ruling, and require no action on your part. What positive scan results will indicate are documents that will behave differently when opened in patched and unpatched versions of Office.

Positive results concentrated on a single machine or set of machines may also indicate the presence of a solution or template generating the affected markup, and may indicate the presence of a solution that will perform differently when opened by a patched or unpatched version of Word.

The scanning tool will work when run by a local user on a local machine. For SharePoint and other systems whose directories are identifiable by a UNC path, the scanning tool can be used on a server to examine documents stored within those systems.

How to Use the Software

IT Administrators can configure a login or startup script for computers in their domain to copy the .exe file to a local machine, and to execute the command line tool. Alternatively, a startup or login script can be created to run the installer locally, and execute the command line tool. For more information on login and startup scripts, visit http://www.technet.microsoft.com, or http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd630947.aspx.

1. Run a command prompt window (Run as Administrator)

2. Go to the directory where you have installed the Custom XML Markup Detection Tool
    a. By default, this directory is "C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Custom XML Markup Detection Tool\"

3. Run the tool with the following command: DetectCustomXMLMarkup.exe [directory path]
    a. For example DetectCustomXMLMarkup.exe c:\temp

4. At this point, the tool will tell you how many files it is scanning and how many files it detected with Custom XML markup

5. An "output.log" file will be created, in the same directory the tool was run, that summarizes the findings of the tool. This log file includes information on files that include Custom XML markup and/or files that the tool encountered errors while scanning. This log file is a tab delimited text file, which can be opened in Notepad or Excel. Here is an example log file opened in Excel:

Notes: The tool works with directories and UNC file paths.

The Installer is located here. 

Taking a break from Custom XML for a moment. more posts on the topic are imminent.

Jennifer Michelstein announced the Office Ribbon Hero today, a fun thing you can install with Office 2007 or the 2010 beta to test your depth of usage of Office.

The challenge, of course, is for you to beat me. :) Good luck with that.

Really, this is a tool that will help you become more proficient in using some of the capability in Office applications. And let's face it, there's nothing that says "I'm smarter than you" like being the best on your block at using Excel.

You can get it here: http://www.officelabs.com/ribbonhero 

By popular demand, Eric White has returned to provide more guidance regarding the use of Content Controls. Eric's guest post today outlines more of how you can use Content Controls in your environment.

......

In a previous post on Gray's blog, I discussed an approach for building a content publishing system using styles and content controls. This is only one of the scenarios where content controls are useful. Another scenario is where you have a sophisticated document generation system where content controls are replaced with automatically generated text. The replacement instructions could be fairly elaborate - perhaps including the database server name, table name, filter, and column name, for example. In a different scenario, you may have a system that automates testing of code listings that are contained in documents, and you may have build instructions for each snippet in the document. I blogged about this approach in OpenXmlCodeTester: Validating Code in Open XML Documents.

Note: I co-wrote this post with Anil Kumar. Many thanks to Anil for writing the managed add-in code.

In all of the above scenarios, you may have the need to associate arbitrary amounts of data with each content control. You may also have the requirement that the document author can create and edit this auxiliary information. Content controls don't directly have a facility for storing and maintaining such information, but there is a fairly easy approach to solving this problem.

Note: In this post, I refer to 'custom XML parts'. Open XML documents are stored using the Open Packaging Conventions. They are essentially zip files (packages) that contain multiple XML and other types of files (parts) within them. These parts are related to each other by a very specific mechanism called relationships. A custom XML part is a part (a file in XML format) of your own design stored in the package. You can design your own XML vocabulary for this part. I've written an MSDN article, The Essentials of Open Packaging Conventions, which explains what you need to know to work with packages and parts. 'Custom XML parts' in this sense are not affected by January 2010 update  for Office Word that Gray has blogged about previously.   Custom XML parts will continue to be supported in Word.

The gist of the technique for associating data with content controls is as follows:

You create a custom XML part that contains some XML that looks something like this:

If you need to maintain more than one value for each content control, you can have as many child elements of the Content element as necessary.

Each content control contains a unique ID that is assigned by Word upon creation of the content control. The data in the custom XML part is related to the content control using this ID. Following is the markup for one of the content controls that is related to the above XML:

You can make it easy for users to edit this auxiliary information in a custom task pane. To create this functionality, you create an Office managed add-in. When the focus is in a content control, the task pane is updated with information from the custom XML part, and when the user updates the data, the managed add-in updates the custom XML part. The following screen shot shows the task pane that is created by the example presented in this post:

As the user moves from content control to content control, the example updates the contents of the task pane. If the user moves to text in the document that is not in a content control, the example clears the text box in the task pane, and disables the "Update CustomXml Part" button. Another approach that you can take is to hide and show the task pane as the selection moves into and out of content controls. The example contains commented-out code that shows how to do this.

This example relies on the user pressing the "Update CustomXml Part" button. You may want to take another approach of updating the custom XML part data when the user changes any data in the task pane.

Custom Task Panes Overview provides a detailed explanation of custom task panes, and how to create them. Deploying a Visual Studio Tools for the Office System 3.0 Solution for the 2007 Microsoft Office System Using Windows Installer provides what you need to know to deploy an add-in.

There are three source files for this example:

You can download the code, along with a Visual Studio solution here.

Background reading
What is Custom XML- ... and the impact of the i4i judgment on Word,
Associating Data with Content Controls,
Using Content Controls vs. Custom XML Elements,
Scanning tool to detect documents with custom XML 

A few questions have popped up about the patch for Custom XML and I thought I'd take a moment to address those. First, please see the patch posted on the public download site.

This patch will be not "pushed" through our update channels , because existing customers are not required to install it.

Will the patch be "pushed" to my system? Is this an automatic update?
No. The patch will not be made available from Microsoft Update or Office Update, and will not be "pushed" to any user's machine by Microsoft services.

What about future Office updates such as hotfixes or Security patches? Will the patched version of Word require different updates?
We will continue to provide security updates and hotfixes that work with both patched and unpatched versions of Word.

How can I tell if a document uses CustomXML markup?
The easiest way to know is by opening the document in an unpatched version of Word and to look for the "pink tags" that typically delineate CustomXML markup. Alternatively, for large volumes of documents, we will make a document scanning tool available which will evaluate .DOCX and .DOCM files for the presence of CustomXML markup. My next blog post will offer more information regarding this tool, which we plan to make available at no charge. Because .DOC files are not affected, we do not plan to offer a scanning tool for them.

Background Reading
What is Custom XML- ... and the impact of the i4i judgment on Word,
Regarding Custom XML Patch distribution and availability,
Associating Data with Content Controls,
Scanning tool to detect documents with custom XML 

In my last post, What is "Custom XML" . . . and the impact of the i4i judgment on Word, I took some steps to identify the areas of Word that are affected by the ruling. This generated a handful of questions from people seeking to understand how they should consider moving forward with solutions in Word.

It is important to understand that using custom XML markup isn't the only way to supply semantic meaning to rich markup. Content controls provide an excellent user experience for this.

The following is a guest post by Eric White, explaining an approach for using styles and content controls for implementing an authoring environment for a publishing system. If you haven't read Eric's blog before, I highly recommend it as a source for learning Open XML and Word development. Eric is among the most knowledgeable about development using Open XML.

..........

I've seen publishing systems that use styles as a means for supplying semantic meaning to content, but this is problematic in some scenarios (but the problems are solvable by content controls). You could format the above document to look like this:

The above screen clipping uses an option in Word that allows you to display the style name for every paragraph to the left of the paragraph.

You could then write a transform from this to the desired format. This approach is problematic because the approach for extracting content involves grouping together adjacent paragraphs of a particular style, and this can lead to an idiosyncratic experience for content writers. For example, I've seen a system where the writer needed to supply a specially formatted line for a code block that would indicate the language for the code. If you needed to supply code snippets for multiple languages, you *needed* to supply a blank line formatted as normal between the code snippets:

This is, of course, problematic. If the writer did not supply this blank line, then the transform would conjoin the two code blocks. I suppose that the developers writing the transform could watch for the magic lines that contain [c#] or [vb], but writing code that looks for magic values is never a good idea. What if there is some valid code that contains that exact string on a line as part of a multi-line string? The transform would be broken, and worse, the writer would need to hack the code in some way to make the transform work properly.

If I were designing a content publishing system that needed to allow writers to work in Word and then transform the document to another format upon publishing, I would design it to use content controls. It is far better to use content controls to group multiple lines together, and to supply appropriate metadata about those lines.

The transform can then extract the contents of each code block in a deterministic fashion.

Here are the characteristics that I would give to a publishing system:

· If there is a direct transform from a single paragraph in a source document to a corresponding construct in the transformed document, then use paragraph styles. You can alter the user experience in Word to allow only valid styles.

· If there is a direct transform from runs in a paragraph to desired constructs in the transformed document, then use character styles.

· Using styles gives the writer a great user experience. The Word user interface is optimized to allow writers to select paragraphs, apply styles, specify what the style for the paragraph following should be, and so on.

· If you need to select multiple paragraphs for transform to some construct in the transformed document, then use content controls to group those paragraphs. This also gives a great experience. The metadata about grouped paragraphs (the code block in the above example) is clearly specified, and not through some magically formatted line or some other questionable technique. If you are the developer for this system, you can supply macros for easy insertion of content controls, although it is super easy to insert content controls using the stock user interface.

Using styles and content controls gives a user experience that is quite different from editing XML. Instead of inserting elements that surround content, you use styles to supply semantic meaning to paragraphs. If you need to associate groups of paragraphs together, you surround them with a content control.

Here are some additional resources to help you work with content controls:

Using LINQ to XML to Retrieve the Contents of Content Controls

Using DocumentBuilder with Content Controls for Document Assembly

Creating Data-Bound Content Controls using the Open XML SDK and LINQ to XML

I recall saying recently that "this is my last post for 2009." Whoops... I don't think I was anticipating this. I watched with interest yesterday the coverage and reaction to the i4i judgment. I am not keen to share my own thoughts about the case here, but I would like to offer clarity around the specific area of Word in question, and suggestions for what people can do about it if they are using that functionality today. There is much confusion about the part of Word that is actually affected.

First, some things to understand:

We do not anticipate any interruption in the availability of Word or Office 2007. Additionally this ruling has no impact on the scheduled availability of the 2010 Office version which is planned for the first half of CY2010.

Current users are not affected. If you are using the custom XML tags in Word 2003 or 2007 (these show up in Word as Pink Tags around tagged content), you are free to continue doing so with the products you have already purchased.

Open XML standards (all ECMA and ISO versions) are not affected. Even if Word's specific implementation of custom XML support does infringe the i4i patent (which Microsoft does not believe to be the case), i4i has never claimed that its patent is essential to the OXML standard.

Content Controls of Word (screen shot below) are not affected. In Word 2007 and Word 2010, this is a common method of binding document content to data stored in a custom-defined schema within a document.

The functionality that is in question is indicated by the screen shot below. Custom XML Tags in Word documents are visible in the Word user interface as Pink Tags surrounding tagged content in a document.

What you can do if you have questions about your solutions that use Custom XML Tags:

First, download the Office 2010 beta and test your solution. If your solution works in Office 2010, it does not depend on the functionality in question. If your solution does utilize Custom XML Tags, consider re-implementing the solution using Content Controls. Detailed guidance on the use of Content Controls in Word 2007 can be found here. Also note the Word Content Controls Toolkit on CodePlex. The Open XML SDK, of course, is quite useful for getting people up to speed on developing solutions for Word and Open XML.

Update: Additional Detail

In response to several inquiries on the topic, I have included additional text describing the feature area that is affected vs. what is not affected, including links to KB articles which illustrate the capabilities in more detail. 

Affected:

Word 2003 and Word 2007 distributed prior to 1/11/2010 can read files that contain XML markup (ref: “Understanding Word's XML Markup [Word 2003 XML Reference]”, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa212889(office.11).aspx. When custom XML markup is present, Word delineates this content in a Word document which allows it to later save the file to .DOCX, .DOCM, or .XML with that content marked up.

The Word 2007 product distributed by Microsoft after 1/10/2010 will no longer read the Custom XML markup contained within .DOCX, .DOCM, or .XML files.  These files will continue to open, but the Custom XML markup tags will be removed. Custom XML markup stored within .DOC files will not be affected by these changes.  Word 2003 and existing installations of Word 2007 will not be affected by this change.

 Not Affected:

Word 2007 also added features allowing Content Controls to map to XML data stored in a DOCX or DOCM file (ref: “Mapping Word 2007 Content Controls to Custom XML Using the XML Mapping Object”, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb510135.aspx). Content Controls and XML data stored within DOCX or DOCM files will not be affected by this change. 

Continuing on the theme of Q & A for Office 2010, I thought I'd add a few questions, answers and pointers to get you oriented to some key topics relevant to 2010. We get a lot of interest from folks who are just starting to code on Office, I thought it worthwhile to run down the list of FAQ's as a shortcut.

Q. Are you supporting VBA in Office 2010?
A. Yes. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee814735(office.14).aspx will get you started. Office 2010 VBA is a live and well.

Q: What is the best way to get started with Open XML?
A: I strongly recommend using the Open XML SDK for real-world Open XML development. This short video clip from Zeyad has a pretty good explanation of why that is the case.

Q: What is PowerPivot and where can I learn more about it?
A: Start here for PowerPivot: http://www.powerpivot.com/index.aspx. Lots of promises out there for managing the bulk of data in global analysis type problems, but very few jaw-dropping experiences like this one. Best to just install it and try it for yourself. Where other products are struggling to create a connection to live data (rather than snapshotting it in a workbook), Excel and PowerPivot put BI in the hands of the masses like nothing before it has done.

Q: What is the most common way to build a solution for Office?
A: Hopefully this answer is only news to new developers, but Visual Studio with VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office) is the best, most commonly used and easiest way to build add-ins and solutions. VS & VSTO allow you create managed-code solutions for Office. For all new Office developers, I would recommend starting in VSTO to get you up to speed. VSTO is great at addressing many of the small issues that are involved with building and deploying add-ins to our products.

Q: What is OBA?
A: Office Business Applications (OBA) refers to the concept of Office being used as a front-end for line of business data and solutions. Increasingly this is the mode of Office development, beyond the VBA automation and add-in development that we've had in the past. Because users are familiar with Office, developers can code apps within an environment that has a very short learning curve. Analyzing data in Excel is natural for users of Excel. Scheduling meetings in Outlook is the same, whether that meeting is booked in SAP, on Exchange or to your Live calendar. There are tremendous advantages to surfacing LOB Data and process to users in Office, one of which is masking business process complexity for novice users inside of easy tools that they already know how to use. To see some examples of OBA's in action, visit http://www.obacentral.com. Two good books on building OBA's that I can recommend: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/book.aspx?ID=9471&locale=en-us, and http://www.amazon.com/Pro-SharePoint-Solution-Development-Sharepoint/dp/1590598083.

Q: What's playing on your Zune right now?
A: That would be "Music from the North" by the Jayhawks. Album that is great from top to bottom.

Q: What are the best web sites for learning Office development?
A: Off the top of my head, here's a list:

- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/default.aspx
- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/aa905363.aspx
- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa905371.aspx
- http://www.openxmldeveloper.org

And some non-Microsoft sites that are worthwhile:

- http://pptfaq.com/FAQ00032.htm
- http://www.codeforexcelandoutlook.com/
- http://word.mvps.org/index.html
- http://www.infopathdev.com/
- http://www.powells.com/biblio?show=TRADE%20PAPER:NEW:9781430210726:49.99 (I am a frequent visitor to Portland and I do love Powell's)

- http://officedeveloper.net/ (I forgot the link that caused me to put this section into the post from Ty Anderson.)

He has a good book as well. http://www.powells.com/biblio?show=TRADE%20PAPER:NEW:9781430210726:49.99

I'll point at more links when I get started, but I hope that this helps newer Office developers get started.

Customers have many questions about Office 2010, so may decisions related to Office deployment depend on their answers. I am creating a post to address the ones that come up most frequently on the technical side for Office 2010. I will keep adding FAQ' type posts with links in hopes that I can help search engines get people to the right places on key topics. Sysreq's are a big one, here's what I've got for you.

Q: What are the System Requirements for Office 2010?

A: With the caveat that this pertains to BETA software as of today, here's where we are at now with system requirements. Differences between 2007 and 2010 are highlighted in Red. Please understand that the 2010 requirements are subject to change, and will likely add additional detail as we move closer to general availability. The disk footprint is what has changed most significantly, but for the most part, the sysreq's are quite similar between the two versions. Recall that back when we shipped Office 2007 SP2, we made investments in performance, particularly with Outlook. We're hopeful that the release version of 2010 will continue improving performance, so that the experience with 2010 will improve across the board.

FAQ: I have 64-bit hardware. Should I install Office 2010 64-bit or Office 2010 32-bit?

a: With the 64-bit version, advanced users will benefit from increased memory utilization of 64-bit hardware. The transition to 64-Bit version will require 32-bit applications and add-ins to be recompiled to 64-bit, however, the leap will offer advanced users exponentially larger memory addresses required for large datasets and intensive computations. For the best compatibility I would recommend 32-bit Office 2010 for both 32-bit and 64-bit Operating Systems. Office 64-bit is optimized for advanced data analysis scenarios that most users don't require.

Update: URL's in the post were not functioning properly, and have now been fixed. 

Today we are please to announce that a public beta of Office Environment Assessment Tool, a beta of Office Code Compatibility Inspector and a draft of the Assessment and Remediation Guide are now available for download at the new Office 2010 Application Compatibility resource page on MSDN. These tools and documentation are made available to you as per our announcement of the Office 2010 Application Compatibility program at SPC09 in October. Please use the links below to navigate and get the tools and the documentation. We encourage you to send us your feedback, comments and suggestions by either using Office 2010 Application Compatibility Forum on TechNet or by just sending a direct mail to ofappcpt@microsoft.com.

Tools and Guidance

Office 2010 Code Compatibility Inspector

The Office Code Compatibility Inspector for VBA and the Office Code Compatibility Inspector for Visual Studio are add-ins that you install with Office 2010 or Visual Studio. The tools scan VBA, VB.NET, and C# code for object model usage that is incompatible with Office 2010.

Office Code Compatibility Inspector Documentation
Office Environment Assessment Tool (OEAT)

This tool helps you determine the kinds of add-ins that are installed on users' computers and the extent to which the add-ins are used. OEAT collects and reports add-in information about Office 2000, Office XP, Office 2003, and the 2007 Office system.

Office Environment Assessment Tool Quick Start Guide
Office Environment Assessment Tool User Manual

Application Compatibility Assessment and Remediation Guide

The Application Compatibility Assessment and Remediation Guide for Office 2010 describes the overall assessment and remediation process, including planning, testing, piloting, and deployment.

Send us feedback on the Code Compatibility Inspector and OEAT via e-mail

It's a small thing, but fun. Today I was given my 5-year service award for Microsoft. With a brief ceremony and a few jokes about how much more gray hair I have these days, I am now the proud owner of a new conversation piece. Just like Star Trek, I have a crystal that is seemingly capable of recording my memories and replaying them at will.

Unfortunately I don't have the glamorous history of so many people at Microsoft have. I do not have an expensive MBA, nor was I a catch in the college recruiting net. I do not wear the badge of having managed a failed startup / VC-backed thing. I was / am an "industry hire" with a surprisingly boring history of working on very successful products and services. I worked on Adobe Acrobat and PDF for a long period of time. I worked for a company named System, Integrators, Inc. Once a leader in the monolithic newspaper publishing automation space. I was a System Engineer there, working on Tandem hardware, installing systems, doing Y2K conversions, and writing routines in languages like TACL, RGEN, FGEN, FUP and a few other favorites.

I chose to work for Microsoft expecting to find great people building great products. I expected a highly competitive, smart work environment. I expected that the talent level at Microsoft would be the highest that I would have ever seen. In joining the Office team and one of the largest and most significant franchises in the brief history of software, I expected to find a caliber of leadership that exists in very few places.

I must say that my expectations have been exceeded in almost every instance. The IQ of each individual in this company is amazing. The per-capita talent level at Microsoft is something that one must witness in person to truly understand. It can work against you on occasion, when you have too many smart people asking hard questions. But on the whole, I will continue to bet on Microsoft long after I am gone because of the discipline the company has for finding, selecting, cultivating and utilizing talent.

Things I have worked on / with or Titles I have held:

- Sr. Product Manager, Microsoft Word
- Sr. Product Manager, Microsoft InfoPath
- Sr. Product Manager, Open XML
- Group Product Manager, Office Technical Product Management
- Group Product Manager, Office for IT Professionals
- Group Product Manager, Office for Developers

Most of my role at Microsoft (despite the numerous titles) really revolves around doing more with data, and improving portability of information between our applications and other systems. Data portability is a concept that I learned and practiced building newspaper production automation systems (that were invented in the mid-1980's). For all the hubub about XML, SOA, Services-based computing, etc., this central idea really has not evolved much. Certainly the technology has changed a lot, but the end goal is still the same - enabling information exchange between systems and applications to enable better information exchange between people. (There's a famous saying at Microsoft about "Solving any problem through abstraction" - sorry for "abstracting" a bit here. In truth the problem is complex, nuanced and fiercely competitive among software vendors.)

I'll end the ramble here with a thought - for the readers from other software companies, a bit of a challenge to you.

Microsoft is great as an employer for many reasons, but one in particular that is worth highlighting is the competitive fire and spirit that burns in the core of so many individuals here.

I once worked for an employer who regarded competitors in a very unhealthy way. I won't quote some of the statements that were particularly offensive, to avoid internet searches that might reveal the identity of those people. But I'll just summarize it by saying that when issues / publicity about competitive products surfaced, the general mentality set by leadership (and therefore employees) was "how dare you?" As if they were viewing other companies who dared build similar products as a personal affront. Part of my reason for leaving the job was this mentality. competitors were innovating, and the company was responding by sending MBA's into business strategy reviews to "Fix" it.

Microsoft is quite different. A very important moment from early in my Microsoft career was when I watched Steve Ballmer on stage at a meeting talking about competition. I'll spare the context, but I have a very vivid impression of him standing there, rolling up the sleeves of his powder blue button-down shirt, saying "Bring it on." - Never was there a more concise encapsulation of the mentality of this company. It isn't about MBA's in a strat review for us - it is about engineers writing code and innovating. We focus on the product, and we are strongly committed to our customers and their success.

It is for this reason that I stay at Microsoft. We're not always perfect, there is definitely a "bleeding edge" to brining new products and technologies to market. As we stand on the front end of the Office 2010 launch, though, one can't help but have a very good feeling. When we get it right, the impact on how people interact with computers is profound and long-lasting.

Here's to hoping the next 5 years are as gratifying as the last.

If you are developing add-ins or customizations for Outlook, these changes in 2010 are worth noting. I'm pulling an article out of the MSDN Office Development Library to alert you to an important change to the way Outlook shuts down. The article contains several alternative strategies for successfully managing Outlook shutdown with your add-ins. There are also Reg keys for IT to force the 2007 shutdown behavior.

The changes were made to address end user feedback related to Outlook performance, and should result in implementation changes for Outlook developers that improve the situation. Good add-in developers seek to minimize perf impact as much as possible, and this change in Outlook is a good "suggestion" for how to better manage the closing of data files & global updates from Outlook on exit. 

"Starting in the Outlook 2010 Beta release, Outlook, by default, does not signal add-ins that it is shutting down. Specifically, Outlook no longer calls the OnBeginShutdown and OnDisconnection methods of the IDTExtensibility2 interface during fast shutdown. Similarly, an Outlook add-in written with Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office no longer calls the ThisAddin_Shutdown method when Outlook is shutting down.

The impact of the changes on an add-in depends on what the add-in does during these events. Most add-ins use these events to release references to Outlook COM objects and clear memory that was allocated during the session. In these cases, the impact on the add-ins is minimal; Outlook releases the remaining COM object references and shuts down, and Windows reclaims the memory when the Outlook process exits.

For some add-ins, the changes have more impact. If an add-in uses these events to commit data (for example, to store user settings or to report usage to a Web server), those activities will no longer take place. Depending on the scenario, this may or may not have a visible impact to users. To remedy the situation, the add-in developer can modify the add-in to be compatible with the changes, or an IT administrator can use group policy to restore the original behavior for a specific add-in."

  Application Shutdown Changes in Outlook 2007 SP2

  Client Shutdown in MAPI

  What's New for Developers in Outlook 2010

Managing Compatibility for Outlook Add-ins with Shutdown procedures

Add-ins should be reviewed per the guidelines in the article to determine whether the shut-down procedures are truly necessary. If they are, however, and IT wants to improve cross-version compatibility, the article details the registry keys available for forcing Outlook to use the 2007 shutdown methods.

Individual Add-in Setting (recommended)

With this setting, Outlook selectively provides shutdown notifications to the specified add-in without notifying all add-ins. Configure this setting for each add-in through the add-in registration in the HKCU or the HKLM registry hives, by adding an additional value to the add-in registration. Type the following text as a single line.

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Add-ins\<ProgID>[RequireShutdownNotification]=dword:0x1

Setting this value to 0x1 enables the add-in to receive blocked callbacks during Outlook shutdown. This has an impact on the performance of Outlook shutdown and should be evaluated as part of a deployment. This setting should be used only if an add-in has significant compatibility issues with the new shutdown mechanism. Setting the value to 0x0 uses the default behavior of Outlook 2010.

Global Setting

Use this setting to change the new shutdown mechanism to match that used by Outlook 2007. You can deploy the setting through group policy, either per user or per computer. Type the following text as a single line.

HKCU\Policies\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\14.0\Options\Shutdown[AddinFastShutdownBehavior]=dword:0x1

Setting AddinFastShutdownBehavior to 0x1 enables shutdown notifications for all add-ins. Setting the value to 0x0 uses the default behavior of Outlook 2010.

These two settings provide administrators complete control over the effect that this new behavior has on custom solutions and add-ins that are used in the enterprise. During the evaluation period of Outlook 2010 Beta, it is important that organizations test any custom solutions using Outlook add-ins to ensure compatibility with this change.

During the launch wave we spend a lot of time "readying" various teams around the company and externally about the new capabilities for developers in Office 2010. This is a topic of great interest across our technical field in particular, due to the multitudes of solutions that are built on Office to do everything from document automation to billable hours booking. I recently had to record one of my training sessions. Normally I'm not one to enjoy camera time (I'm much more comfortable behind one than in front), but there is a nice forcing function about these types of presentations that most software people understand (but rarely discuss.) This is a great opportunity to organize your thoughts. Nothing like having 45 seconds of someone's attention to get your message focused on the things that folks absolutely must understand.

As a Thanksgiving treat, I thought I'd pull back the curtain on that process a bit, and in the process unfold my story on what's new in Office 2010 for development. Hopefully this should be a fun post, but I suppose I'll hear it from you if it is or is not.

The format of this talk was as a Q&A interview-style discussion.

Gray can you tell me what's different about developing with Office 2010?

"We're investing heavily in this segment. There is a lot to like in Office 2010 for developers. These investments go far beyond VBA & Add-ins that people traditionally associate with Office development. We're moving toward service & data oriented development, focusing specifically on improving end user productivity with line-of-business applications. For the community of VBA developers & VSTO developer base, we are upgrading the environment to support new Office functionality, 64-bit Office and the Fluent User Interface."

What I'm omitting / not saying: The types of solutions and the types of developers for Office is quite broad, and it is a little challenging to summarize in a short "message" without the watery "changing the developer landscape to improve productivity through enhanced tools and services" or other change-the-channel-right-now speak. The fact is that between VBA, OBA, Open XML, SharePoint and other communities, there are tens of millions of people developing on Office in one form or another. We are very excited about that, and motivated to keep this community of folks happy.

 Can you give me a sense for what new features have been added in 2010 for developers?

"Developing successful productivity applications really involves the utilization of 3 core areas. 

Office is the best consumer of SharePoint solutions and new features in 2010 are designed to make SharePoint and Office light up in new ways. SharePoint lists, for example, can be taken offline in SharePoint Workspace, where InfoPath form templates are designed for interacting with those. Access solutions can now be fully migrated to SharePoint in 2010, to the point where Access is used by the designer to build and publish the solution, and SharePoint portals are the place where users interact with that data. BCS, a new feature of SharePoint for creating and managing read/write data connections to 3rd party systems, has a client-side cache and built-in functionality which allows applications like Access and Outlook cache and work offline with LOB data.

Interoperability for Office is a core priority - availability of Office formats and standards-based services connectivity for Office are two examples of how our investments are paying off. We're also improving the development experience for Office. Word Services and the Open XML SDK automate the document assembly that people previously did with VBA scripting of Word. The recent announcement of the PST format specification is a great example of how we're publishing more of our protocols & formats to encourage integration and interoperability with Office.

We're spending time improving the experience for Office development. With .NET 4.0, Office 2010 and Visual Studio 2010, we're doing good things like removing the dependency on the Office PIA's, to reduce the deployment friction. We have introduced a new Application Compatibility Program for Office 2010, to help migrate code from 2003 & 2007 to Office 2010. The compat tools and documentation are available for free, but also appear in several of our enablement channels, including DDPS, MCS, MDT and others. Some of you may have also seen the recently re-designed developer center for Office on MSDN."

What I'm omitting / not saying: That in many ways Office is becoming essentially a wide open surface for external data. BCS is a read/write connector to 3rd party systems. the Outlook social connector is an API to wire social networking feeds into your mail client. Office surfaces the new taxonomy / folksonomy data in SharePoint 2010. Workflow is consumed directly within client apps. Support for REST and LINQ make query-level tweaking of data / content so much easier. The Open XML SDK gives you element-level access to a document, the "File Save As" on a server that is Word Services uses the Word rendering engine that was actually built to work on a server. (the scripted client solutions were not designed to do that, evident by the hassle of managing unexpected dialog boxes and alerts in the VBA / Macro environment). Again, there are so many things worth mentioning here that it is hard to really pull together into a summary. The diversity of Office development is (not surprisingly) a reflection of the breadth of capability offered in the products.

This challenge is a primary reason we invested in a re-design of MSDN. The "re-design" goes far beyond re-arranging the furniture on the site. New tagging schemes, SEO, information architecture are designed to get you to the answer faster. Having spent some time in the past few weeks digging into the PowerPoint OM, I very much appreciate the ability to navigate to key content (like the PowerPoint.Shape.TextFrame.Ruler object without having to use the search field.

Privately I worry a lot about how to strike a balance between discussing capabilities, features and categories of functionality. Level up too high, and it reads like marketing language. Level it too low and you risk people not appreciating the breath of the offering, and how much of the daily business productivity solution space that Office is capable of absorbing. When I see corporate developers trying to recode pivot tables in a web page, I scratch my chin sometimes and I wonder what we can do to help customers take more value out of what they already have sitting in front of them.

You mentioned VBA - is this still going to be supported in Office 2010? I keep hearing that it is going away.

"VBA is a very healthy and active community, and VBA is a very important part of Office, including the 2010 release. VBA is not going anywhere. In fact, we have upgraded VBA to support the new, native 64-bit Office client. We love VBA. Please continue using VBA."

What I'm omitting / not saying: . if I had a dime. VBA is something we take pretty seriously on the product team, for two reasons. The first and obvious reason is that countless productivity solutions are written in VBA. The number of VBA coders is likely in the tens of millions - that by itself should be a good reason to care about anything. But VBA is also a primary gateway to Visual Studio. Many VBA coders cross the bridge into more professional development. I am one of those (translating my Tandem / TACL skill set to the world of .NET). The Developer documentation team at Microsoft writing the material for VBA is painstakingly precise. The amount of energy they invest in understanding the needs, likes and dislikes of MSDN subscribers is incredible. By the way, if you're reading the documentation on MSDN, you should use the rating / feedback tools on the site. The teams use them more than you might think.

What are the gotchas that Office developers should be looking out for?

"The 64-bit transition is one that people are going to have to pay attention to. 32-bit and 64-bit solutions have to be compiled separately. Some of the 32-bit code will have to be updated for 64-bit. ActiveX and COM-based addins will need updating. Managed code should be fine, for the most part. Our application compatibility tools will help identify areas of your projects that need updating.

.NET 4.0 presents an interesting opportunity. If you've written an add-in that uses the Office PIA's, it might be time to upgrade that to .NET 4.0 and drop the PIA's - one less thing to worry about during deployment. We're also including the VSTO runtime for Office into the Pro Plus builds, this should make things a little easier as well.

Lastly, the Fluent User interface lands in all client apps now. Outlook, Project, Visio, SharePoint workspace, etc. So if you have an add-in for some of the 2007 or 2003 apps based on the buttons, it's worth paying attention to how they show up in the Fluent UI."

What I'm omitting / not saying: . not a lot really, other than to mention again that the App compat tools are a big deal and people should take advantage of them. They will definitely help. If I were to really expand the category, I'd say that folks should take a good look at what they've built and see if there is an opportunity to move some of the client-side scripting into SharePoint, particularly around documents. The environment is so much better on the server side to do that kind of work, we're very hopeful to see adoption take off quickly for it.

Last question, if you had to explain in one minute or less why companies SHOULD be developing on Office, what would you say?

"The average enterprise has 51 line of business applications, and presumably, each of those drives a set of applications. Imagine if you are an end user who is asked to work with even a fraction of those - think of how much investment is made in training people! Wouldn't it be better if everybody did all of their calendaring in Outlook - where they do the majority of scheduling already? Why do forecasting in a data grid on a web page? Why not do it in excel, where all the tools (like Solver) are available and can help users be more effective? Leveraging office as the user experience for business applications - with SharePoint or with other application platforms - makes a lot of business sense and makes users more productive faster."

What I'm omitting / not saying: . most CIO's get this. Office client may not be the first thing people think of, but when you put it into simple economics, it's hard to argue against. I have had countless conversations with architects that gravitate toward Office client as the landing spot because of the end user adoption issues. Office makes it very easy for people to get going. There are lots of great things to be done on the Web, and there is a lot of activity around that, for sure. But when it comes to measuring up on ROI, and when time to market counts, Office client wins, a lot. We might not be the ones wearing the hot pink tuxedo or the glow-in-the-dark dress at the dance, but we have the most dates, know the most dance steps, and we don't step on your toes.

Kurt starts today's discussion with a quick conversation on the Business Productivity Infrastructure. If you know the Office and SharePoint environment well, this is probably something you've seen us discuss before.

It was at PDC08 when we announced that we will be releasing Office Web Applications that provide a high-fidelity & consistent experience for users who want to access and modify Office content in a browser, mobile device or the rich client. It was also at the last PDC that we announced that our Business Productivity Online Services were releasing giving our customers, partners and developer real choice of on-premises and Online. SharePoint Online is something that's real today. Customers like Aon Corporation, Aviva PLC, McDonald's Corporation, Tyco Flow Control, University of Ohio and many others, have chosen Microsoft Online Services in just the last few months. Our customer base spans consumers to small companies to large enterprises with over 500 Million Office client licenses and 100 Million SharePoint license WW. Over 17,000 customers have deployed SharePoint today.

With Office 2010 & SharePoint 2010, we are looking to provide even greater experiences across multiple devices with choice. Rich out-of-the-box capabilities from Enterprise Search to Collaboration to Business Intelligence social computing features, line of business integration and tooling investments. For developers, the 2010 wave will provide unprecedented opportunities. Our research shows that the SharePoint services opportunities alone for developers and partners is 5.6B and expected to grow to 6.1B in FY11. We've also seen hundreds of thousands of developers have worked with SharePoint the past year and we believe that will increase to over one million of developers over the next couple of the years. With this in mind, we're delivering a robust developer platform that you can build rich and engaging productivity solutions that can be accessed by any device and hosted on premises and the cloud.

Office and SharePoint provide many of the building blocks to build an array of applications including document processing, line-of-business front-ends, human workflows, reporting and analysis and .COM sites. In fact, on SharePoint 2007 alone, there are over 1,000 .COMs including brand names like Kraft, Volvo & Ferrari.

As you look across the spectrum of capability for Office and SharePoint 2010, you'll see that there is a tremendous amount of capability for developers building solutions. Office is frequently used as the front end to line of business processes and applications. And let's face it, if you're an information worker in an enterprise environments, and you are asked to use several of the 50 (on average) line of business systems present in an enterprise, it makes A LOT of sense to surface those things in Office. For end users, Office is an environment that is familiar. For Developers, Office is a way to accelerate the end user learning curve by a substantial amount. Multiplying that across the number of users in and systems / processes in play, the math points to giant savings for business applications.

As we've discussed in previous posts, new Access Services and Word Services of SharePoint 2010 are a significant extension to the SharePoint environment. Word Services offers a programmatic "Save As", enabling bulk document conversion for word formats using all of the formats supported by the client application, using the same rendering engine. Access Services provide huge governance benefits because they allow end users to upload and manage their Access solutions as SharePoint pages, rather than storing the data on the local machine.

There are several capability areas here that represent much power for developers. We'll break these down in more details in future posts.

As many have speculated, the Public Beta for Office and SharePoint are available today. http://www.microsoft.com/2010 is the link to visit to get started. Start with the Beta here: http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/en/default.aspx

More in a moment as the keynote unfolds.

We're making two other announcements today: Duet Enterprise for Microsoft SharePoint and SAP. The joint solution from SAP and Microsoft will enable interoperability between SAP applications and SharePoint 2010 and provide complete flexibility and extensibility to compose solutions that blend the worlds of process and collaboration. Duet Enterprise enables customers to generate more value from their investments by extending the reach of SAP to more users and expand the scope of SharePoint. Duet Enterprise offers highly efficient interoperability between SAP and SharePoint 2010 addressing the growing need for team collaboration, business insight and to boost personal and team productivity. Duet Enterprise empowers all employees to consume and extend SAP processes and information from Microsoft SharePoint and Office 2010.

Duet Enterprise is planned to deliver:

· A Foundation to enable interoperability between SAP and Microsoft SharePoint 2010

· Tools and services to support the composition of solutions that blend the worlds of process and collaboration

· Ready-to-use capabilities that provide immediate value for end users

We are also announcing the Outlook Social Connector. In doing so, we are bringing social networking to the place where people spend the majority of their work day - Outlook. OSC adds context to email for a richer user experience. It looks at your Inbox along with the rest of your Outlook data to bring you up to speed on all the latest messages, attachments, and meetings I've received from people in various social networks. The social connector also integrates personal and professional networking feeds from Windows Live and SharePoint 2010. You can see friends' activities and profile data from Windows Live, if someone updates their Space or uploads a document to SkyDrive, you'll see that. You will also see colleagues activities and profile data from SharePoint, if they make a mod to their MySite, you'll see that as well.

LinkedIn will be the first 3rd party network available to the OSC. We have been working with them to build a provider which will be available early next year. We're demoing the LinkedIn integration today. Perhaps the best news for developers, though, is that we are releasing an SDK on MSDN so that you can write providers for your own networks. This certainly adds a new dimension to Outlook, and will greatly enrich the value of social networks by providing the context of the work done in Outlook. Start at the Office developer center on MSDN to get the SDK. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/default.aspx. Update: the link to the OSC SDK will be here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms123402.aspx?missingurl=%2fen-us%2flibrary%2fee829696(office.14).aspx hang loose as it will go live soon.

Today has been a very exciting day for us, and as we move forward, we'll have lots more to share. If you're here at PDC, stop by the Office booth and say hello. If you're not here at PDC, well, bummer you missed out on the free laptop, but as you can see much will evolve based on our announcements at the show.

 Update: http://blogs.msdn.com/erikaehrli/archive/2009/11/18/getting-started-with-office-2010-development.aspx. Erika has blogged about Getting Started with Office 2010 development,and the newly launched Office Developer Center on MSDN.

(comments from before the keynote are below)

Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 will be featured as part of this morning's PDC09 keynote. It will be an exciting day. At this moment I'm sitting backstage, waiting for the festivities to begin. Kurt DelBene, the keynote speaker is through the preparations and is warming up back stage. Derek Burney is rehearsing demos. Lots of energy back here. Steven Sniofsky has just taken the stage.

During the keynote I'll be updating this post with new data. Stay tuned.

This photo is of Derek Burney during rehearsal. A very empty room at the time, now filled with thousands of developers.

As we get ready with final slide tweaks, demo run-throughs and all that, Stephen is discussing some of the aspects of Windows 7 Development, including SQM, WER and others. No surprise that Stephen is filled with interesting news and is great for the audience. This blurry photo is backstage at the show. We go on in about 45 minutes.

Right now folks are pretty excited because it was just announced that attendees will be given a free Acer multitouch laptop. Big applause. Steven just wrapped, and Scott Guthrie of Silverlight is on stage. I saw their demos during rehearsal yesterday, more awesome demos are about to unfold. As expected, ScottGu's keynote is wowing people. In his keynote Scott discussed that 45% of internet connected devices are Silverlight enabled. Quite a jump from the 33% reported earlier this year. Silverlight 4 was also announced, and Scott is walking through the new features now. Some interesting data points: Siemens medical imaging is using Silverlight for applications, Bloomberg has Silverlight installed on 300,000 terminals. Examples of NFL, Victoria's Secret, Netflix, NBC Olympics and others are on display. Very impressive.

Just getting through the last of the Silverlight 4 demos. A very exciting presentation, to be sure. We're t-5 minutes to the stage. Lots of pacing.