September Came and Went
Life's been suitably crazy. Presuming it has to be that way, I suppose.
Since last posting, I took a job at a smallish consulting company that almost immediately (and, to me, unexpectedly) became part of an insanely large corporation. The good news was it's a corporation I held in good regard, and a company I think has a solid future.
I've never been one of 200,000 employees before; my employee number has eight digits. Having always been one of anywhere from 10 to 200 before, there are some obvious differences. To this point, they've been mostly positive, but we'll see how it all looks after a longer timeframe.
Mostly, I've just been pretty stretched, ergo the silence. Weeknights are for work, weekends are for work. I suppose this is how we keep some of the development jobs from shipping overseas. Isn't that special?
My first project on the new job involves building a large chunk of proof-of-concept functionality on top of Office 11 (aka, Office System 2003) for a large financial institution. It's nearly complete and I haven't truly decided if I like Office 11 as a development platform. We've done everything as purely .NET solution, not a single line of VBA or COM code anywhere. I wouldn't recommend this to everyone, but there are multiple clients on the projects and this was one of the client's requirements. I say this, because Office .NET development really just ends up back at COM via the PIAs, and after working with the cleanliness and predictability of most the framework and the runtime for so long... well, it was like switching from real soda to diet.
The developer functionality in Office 11 is pretty impressive in its depth. In its execution, it's far from perfect but it feels like an early version of something that could be excellent in the future. The one problem I see here is that this future excellence probably doesn't come about until the various APIs have been rewritten rather than wrapped, and I that seems like something that doesn't happen until maybe the Longhorn version of Office, maybe the next one after that.
Still the same, you can do a lot of things that you couldn't do before. And while working with this particular flavor of interop sometimes veers between not-fun and self-flagellation, in the end there really is a solid foundation for making real Office-based applications and managed code.
XML integration is actually pretty awesome in a Word context and it opens up so many possibilities both at the application and the data layers.
SmartDocuments are neat, but the architecture is a little limiting if you're forcing things into .NET behind the scenes.
Custom Task Panes are a great usability win. Working with them imparts less of a winning feeling, but you can make them do a lot interesting things that users seem to love.
Manifest deployment for SmartDocs is actually really cool.
The Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) are neat way to reframe the Office 11 technologies for .NET developers; when I really take a good look at them they seem technically unsubstantial, but at the same time I don't know that they really were intended to be much more than a set of Office-focused project templates.
Office 11 doesn't seem to be faring all that well in the press. I think it's reasonable to look at it as non-revolutionary if you're only looking at end-user functionality. And historically that's how office applications have been evaluated--'what widgets and features do I get in the new version?'
So I don't know what sales will look like when it's been in the marketplace for enough time to make that kind of determination. Personally, having used it for a number of months, the improvements in Outlook nearly justify the upgrade dollars. I do think that large companies who use Office as a significant component in important business processes are ultimately going to want to upgrade. Which is an interesting thought in and of itself--if I were to guess, I would say that probably 80 or 90 percent of Office development has been done at the departmental level in VBA. The kinds of things I see the Office 11 development additions enabling don't really fall into the departmental space per se. Time will tell.
Bonus zing: this is me hoping we find in a couple weeks out that WinForms have been either ridiculously revamped or replaced.