I found this great blog about Office “12″ while surfing the net - Office 12 Watch.
If you’re interested in Office “12″ information and do not have access to the beta program etc. its a good place to start…
There has been some speculation recently about Office “12″ product naming. Steve Bink of Bink.nu has recently attended an IT Forum, where the Office “12″ demos were branded as Office 2007.
Hopefully, this does not mean Office “12″ is going to be late (it was supposed to be released on late 2006)
Technoarti tags: Microsoft, Office, Vista
In case you’ve missed it:
http://blogs.msdn.com/willkennedy/default.aspx
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.
Nominate yourself to be a beta tester for the upcoming Microsoft Office 12. The official name for the new Office is not yet known.
Log on to http://beta.microsoft.com and use PDCOffice as your Guest ID.
On the same note, I just found out about http://www.thehotfix.net/beta.htm which lists Guest IDs for different Microsoft betas…
I really liked what I saw on the keynotes presentation yesterday.
Office 12 is loaded with new features, UI concepts and, hopefully, easier programmability and integration possibilities.
Check out http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/default.mspx for Office12 information (Or usubscribe to the Rss feed: http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/rss.xml).
On a personal note, I can’t wait to get my Office12 TAP account already…
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
You can watch screenshots of Office 12 at http://pdc.xbetas.com/?page=o12preview1
Bill Gate’s keynotes should start in about 10 minutes and should be an interesting to watch…
If you try to refresh an IBF region the region gets duplicated by default.
To stop this you need to define a unique region name in the Port associated with the ShowRegion operation by adding a “RegionName” attribute in the “RegionProperties” element (Its not there by default…).
Microsoft has announced that the next version of Microsoft Office will use a new open XML file formats by default.
Ok… Didn’t we already have XML formats in Office 2003?
The thing is these XML formats were very limited. They were not the default formats, they were very large and had limited functionality (for example, Excel sheet features like graphs etc were not supported by the XML format).
The new XML format addresses all these problems…
This means that full featured office documents can be easily created from company data (ERP etc) by simple XML transformation rather than using more complex solutions like using the interop mechanism, XML data sources etc.
Microsoft is making a lot of effort to make Office 12 easier for integration with backend systems.
This is befitial to Microsoft because the apeal for organizations to upgrade their office system will be much greater
if there are lots of backend-Office integrations products out there (such as SAP-Microsoft Mendocino).
So I guess we’ll see more features like this that open Office to the world….
Links:
The official Press Release
Brian Jones on the new Office XML formats
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.
The Office 2003 license states that the Primary Interop Assemblies are not redistributable.
This just changed a few days ago with the release of these assemblies in a redist package that can be included in a setup program.
Check it out at Microsoft’s downloads site:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=3c9a983a-ac14-4125-8ba0-d36d67e0f4ad&DisplayLang=en
>
Related (updated) article on MSDN:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dno2k3ta/html/officeprimaryinteropassembliesfaq.asp
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 
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
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);
