Condividi tramite

Back from PDC

  • Articolo

I am back from PDC and I can finally post to my blog! I was not able to do it from LA because 2 weeks before PDC I accidentally ran over my laptop with my van. No surprises here - the laptop is quite useless now. So in LA I had access to computers only at the Convention Center and there I was busy chatting with people that know our VSTO stuff pretty well or do not know anything about it or only used previous v1 version of VSTO and were totally blown away with the v2 demos. I had a chance to talk to the people I heard from before but never met face to face (Peter, Bill, Darren and many others, those who have public blogs and those who do not). Many people offered their views and gave us reasons to work on our next version. Should I really say I am grateful for this? Well, I am.

I spoke at the pre-conference where we had about 10 hours long series of sessions covering VSTO v2. I was doing two sessions: one about ActionsPane and SmartTags support and another one about VSTO security. The first session went pretty good. Even the LA power outage that caused us to delay the talk was great because we used it up entirely for the Q&A. The other one was quite difficult. I was told before that CAS related talks are the hardest ones but now I got the chance to experience it myself. I believe I started losing the audience while giving quick overview of CAS - code groups, evidences, four policy levels and intersection of permission sets are just too much to digest in 15-20 minutes of the overview. I completely lost the bravest souls when I pulled up the slide which presented the VSTO AppDomain policy level in the form you usually would see when running caspol -lg (to get this slide I actually copied code from the caspol into my VSTO assembly and modified it to only list the codegroups for the AppDomain policy level). The rational behind the slide was to show the inner workings of our security policy as opposed to presenting VSTO security as a black box with a set of rules that you have to follow. I believe the talk made good to the sales of Eric's book though and only one guy came up to me and thanked for sharing my views :)

We announced VSTA at the PDC. There were a lot of questions about how VSTO is related to VSTA. Both technologies are developed by the same team and hence are closely related. Here is the deal. VSTO roughly can be divided into 2 pieces a) a generic runtime and design time support which does not make any assumptions about what host application is and b) integration of this runtime with Word, Excel and Outlook. As a side note, due to this architecture we were able to build our Outlook support in record time - the first prototype of Outlook support was only done in March 2005. VSTA is even more improved version of VSTO's host agnostic part with additional support for managed hosts (VSTO runtime is primarily addressed at native hosts). However, this time instead of doing the integration part ourselves we will offer the ISVs to integrate VSTA into their applications. I should also say that a lot of new concepts were introduced such as contract and more generally MAF - Managed Addins Framework. BTW, for the deep architectural insights of what it takes to design extensible hosts keep an eye on TQ's blog. Tom is a light version of The Matrix's architect but he actually does make sense :)

I did get an interesting feedback about our blogs. We have a lot of bloggers but we rarely say how we are related organisationally to each other and this sometimes makes things difficult to connect. So here it goes - I do not have any reports and I report to Eric Carter. We primarily are buildng the VSTO runtime and our team is called the frameworks team. Eric reports to JackG, TQ is an architect on our team, he is freelancing here and there and also reports to Jack. Andrew Whitechapel is my and Eric's PM. Paul Stubbs is a PM working on VSTA. John Durant is also a PM driving our Outlook subsidiary. And there is a lot of other great people who not chose yet to go public.

What else? Ah, feedback. I love feedback. If you made it through the end of this post please add your comments, experiences, requests.

To sum it up - the conference was great, I am awfully tired, I missed my family and I am happy to see my kids and wife. Happy VSTOing to all of you.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 18, 2005
    I made it back from PDC too. Its definently good to be back to a familiar area, though having daily room service was pretty nice. I wanted to say 'thanks' for all the hard work you put in at PDC both for speaking and for hanging out in the track lounge. Sorry about monopolizing your time a bit on Thursday. I'll have to try and be a more active participant on the VSTO forums.

  • Anonymous
    September 19, 2005
    Can you give us a little info on VSTO for Access 12? I know it must be pretty difficult to connect up with the exetnsive Access object models, so I expect you're saving the hardest for last. Many of us are really anxious to write .NET code in Access.
  • Anonymous
    September 19, 2005
    Hi Misha,

    Thanks for taking some time to speak with me about .Net control embedding within Word. We're going to give the ActiveX control you mentioned a try to see if it works for some basic embedding with our 3D .Net control. If it does we'll try following up with Eric to see if we can get some assistance or feedback on building something similar.

    Thanks again.
  • Anonymous
    September 20, 2005
    Rich, what we have released so far at the PDC for Access 12 is the support for managed "COM" add-ins and custom task panes support. I will add more on what this managed add-ins support really means in a separate blog. Beyond this we are looking for ideas especially since Access is not our current expertise. Can you suggestions your feedback by leaving your comments here?
  • Anonymous
    September 20, 2005
    Hi Misha,

    First of all, I think that starting with a managed Task Pane is a great idea, especially since presumably we will be able to program it like Windows Forms. Having managed add-ins is nice too, but add-ins are very infrequently used in real Access database projects. Perhaps teh availability of managed code will make add-ins more a lot more attractive in the new version. Task Panes OTOH solve a long standing problem in Access.

    What we could really use is either (1) create some form classes in .NET to closely mimic the Access funtionality and object model (especially the Access data event model), or (2) to wire up Access form controls to the VSTO editor, so we can control Access forms and controls with managed code. I understand that this could be a real challange, especially since Access does not use standard controls - they are supposedly just paint on the screen until they receive the "focus." In any case, the goal is to allow Access developers to continue to work using the superior Access RAD model, while using the superior .NET languages (C# or VB.NET)

    Current .NET Windows forms are not nearly as RAD for database development as Access forms. Access forms can instantly switch views from Form/Datasheet/PivitTable/PivotChart/QueryByForm without any code at all. The Access subform model is fantastic. The form's data events make data management far easier that the .NET model. If these could be duplicated as .NET form classes, and hosted inside the Access window (preferably alongside standard COM/VBA forms), that would be truly fantastic.

    Of course, all of this would need to be deployed with one-click deployment and auto updates! Phew, that sounds like a lot of work.
    But in truth, I think it's even more important than SharePoint integration.
  • Anonymous
    September 20, 2005
    Thanks Rich.
    Basically you want to have support for managed code driving your Access forms. I am a complete Access novice so one very naive question - can you do this using the PIAs today?
  • Anonymous
    September 20, 2005
    Keith and Neil, it is great to hear from you! Thanks for leaving a comment here.
  • Anonymous
    September 21, 2005
    You can automate Access using the PIA, but there is no easy way at present to have .NET handle Access Form/Report events. In truth, automation is not of much use in Access - it is very rarely used, and is primarily used just to start an Access app or display a report. It's much too difficult to use the PIA for any serious work. And then, there's the deployment problem.

    For the current Access versions, it would be great to drop into a VS.NET editor instead of the VBA editor. Basically mirror what has been done in Excel and Word. Providing an option to use VBA or .NET for each form (or each event) would be great. And have framework (and PIA) deployment built into a new deployment wizard.
  • Anonymous
    September 21, 2005
    Hi Misha,
    Good to meet up, I too was glad to get home and give my brain a rest. Well as much as my kids will let me. Keep up the good work on V3 it's looking like it's really coming of age. Look out for Mike Walker next week as he's in the States and going to Demo the VSTO application we have been working on.