Thanks to all of you who attended the Phoenix MSDN Power Series Event on 12/20. The slides will be posted via MSDN Events and I will provide links to them once they are live. A couple of other items for those of you that attended.
Office as a Platform Session
- If you want to know more about server side generation of documents, there is a good article on MSDN about it. I have also posted the code I used in the demo here. To get it to work, you will want to unzip the contents to a directory and open it using the "Open Web Site..." functionality in VS.NET. This demo should work in both VS.NET 2005 and 2008 as long as you have installed .NET Fx 3.0. I also had a question about what reference you need to add if you want to use System.IO.Packaging in your solutions - it is WindowsBase.
- If you are interested in the part of the talk where I modified Word 2007, you can check out my video on an earlier posting to see the walkthru. I have also posted my demo code that wires up the UI to a database here. If you download that code, you will need to have the Northwind sample database installed (it doesn't come with SQL 2005 samples) and you will need to modify the app.config file to point to the appropriate server. Also, you will need Word 2007 and VS.NET 2008 since I used Linq to perform the database interactions. The sample Word document is enclosed in the zip file.
- In both of my demos, I used Word Content Controls to bind the data to the document. If you are interested in building out your own Word Documents with bound content controls, I recommend downloading and installing the Word Content Control Toolkit. This tool enables quick drag and drop to wire up your custom XML to your content controls in Word.
Software + Services
- If you want to know more about what Microsoft is doing in the Software + Services arena you can check out the website.
- Benny who did part of the presentation has a nice writeup here.
The Windows Live Platform
- As I mentioned in my presentation, you can find out just about anything about the Windows Live Platform from a developer perspective at http://dev.live.com. If you are curious about the licensing model, select the topic you are interested in, and then select the Terms of Use.
I hope that you found at least one or two nuggets of information during the day and as always, please feel free to contact me if you want to provide me more detailed feedback.