Bill Fisher's WebLog

Windows Live Writer

2006-08-24T02:01:02Z

Last week, Microsoft launched a Beta release of a new tool called Windows Live Writer. It is a blog creation and editing tool that, for reasons I'm interested in exploring, runs as a rich client.

Windows Vista and the .NET Framework

2006-07-31T19:05:00Z

As our VSTA Premier Support team here at Summit Software works with more and more developers who are integrating VSTA into their applications, we get a lot of questions about the .NET Framework. Some of these questions arise from the fact that Windows XP and earlier releases of the Windows operating system did not include the .NET Framework. For developers who wanted to take advantage of the rich features of .NET, this created obvious issues around the need to ensure the presence of the .NET Framework on each customer's system. For more than a year, developers have known that "Longhorn" would include the .NET Framework. Last month, Microsoft provided some interesting details. In their announcement, Microsoft informed developers that Windows Vista will include the .NET Framework version 3. I doubt I was alone in being surprised by this announcement as I had expected .NET 3.0 to be released as the same time as the "Orcas" release of Visual Studio....(read more)

August issue of MSDN Magazine has a good article about VSTA

2006-07-20T11:57:00Z

Paul Stubbs, a program manager on the programmability team within the Developer division, has written an interesting article about VSTA that was published in the August 2006 issue.

Here's a link to the article:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/08/AddInPower/default.aspx

In his article, Paul does a good job of describing some of the differences between three Microsoft programmability technogies: Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO), and Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA).

The article also describes how InfoPath 2007 has integrated VSTA to allow developers to customized the structured data forms that are a key feature of InfoPath.

You'll find more articles by Paul Stubbs at his blog: blogs.msdn.com/pstubbs.