Cyndy Wessling, a program manager in Office, started blogging about the PDF functionality in Office 12.
Check her blog out at http://blogs.msdn.com/cyndy_wessling/default.aspx.

Tags: Office 12, Office 2007

Jensen is a PM on the Office 12 UX team and his blog will focus on the new UI of Office 12.
Should be interesting…

http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2005/09/12/464350.aspx

Tags: Office 12, Office 2007

Currently, only the Word and Excel PIAs are documented (If you’re using VS2005).

This site tries to feel the gap by providing a wiki dedicated to documenting the entire PIA (Outlook, Power Point, etc…).

So check it out at http://www.officewiki.com/default.aspx.

Tags: Microsoft Office, OBA

Took me a while to figure this one out…

To add a button to the Outlook explorer context menu you need to get the “Context Menu” CommandBar.
This command bar instance is only created when the user right clicks in the explorer so in order to know when such a bar is
created you have to listen to the OnUpdate event of the Explorer’s CommandBars collection.
Inside the OnUpdate event handler you can check if the context menu CommandBar exist :

CommandBar bar = ActiveExplorer.CommandBars["Context Menu"];

After getting the conext menu CommandBar you need to change it’s Protection property to allow customization, add your button, and change the Protection back.

That’s it…  enjoy

Tags: Microsoft Office, OBA, Outlook

I have been having lots of troubles with the Outlook addin I was working on.
This post about using Marshal.ReleaseComObject helped me fix some of my problems:

http://www.shahine.com/omar/WhenReleaseComObjectIsNecessaryInOutlook.aspx

Tags: Microsoft Office, OBA, Outlook

In one of the prototypes I was working on I had to programmatically populate an InfoPath form with data.

After loading the required data and serializing it to the required schema I thought calling “thisXDocument.DOM.loadXML(strXmlData)” should do the job of populating the form with the data.

That call, however, triggers a “The DOM can’t be loaded twice” error.

After a quick search in the SDK help I came up with the following solution (which merges two DOMs):

IXMLDOMDocument newDOM = thisXDocument.CreateDOM();
newDOM.loadXML(strXmlData);
thisXDocument.ImportDOM(newDOM);

Tags: InfoPath, Microsoft Office, OBA