OfficeZealot

Chris Kunicki contacted me that he would like to put me up on the bloggers list at OfficeZealot. I assume this is 'cause I'm exploring the VSTO 2005 part of Visual Studio 2005 (both Beta 1+, plus because developments haven't stopped and builds are processed as we speak) and not as a result of my 'personal everyone can read things about my private life' information.

I'm very honored by his request and I accepted. Blogger however does not natively support rss feeds so we decided to move my blog from Blogger to OfficeZealot. I think this will take some time to get this organized but after that my 'notes' on VSTO 2005 is expected to move to that new location.

Obviously a link to a new location will be provided if the new blog is set up. Until that time I will spend my time reading Office 2003 XML by Lenz, McRae & St. Laurent. The book was recommended on Julie's Blog some time ago, so I decided to get this one and learn some things about Office that I may have missed before ;-)

Beta documentation

Just a small reminder to where you can find some of the Beta documentation:

http://whidbey.msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnanchor/html/odc_ancoffsol.asp

This is the link to the Office part... click on "Show TOC" to display all other items...

Deploy VSTO solution

Last two days I have been struggling with deploying a VSTO 2005 solution to another location (i.e. another directory other than the bin output directory within my VSTO project) to research how VSTO solutions security behaves if you move them.

I knew that in order to allow your solutions to run in a specific location you had to grant the solution some trust before allowing you to run the code. One way is using the .NET configuration tools, the other is using caspol.

Well I apparently did some bad things with these tools and ended up removing my Visual Studio 2005 and reinstalling because none of my solutions worked after I messed up security settings.

When I reinstalled everything, and was up and running again I tried to do the exercise again, now more controlled:

- Rebuild the VSTO 2005 solution with Visual Studio 2005 (beta1)
- Copy the output from the bin directory to another location
- Test: try to run without changing security.... code did not run, that was expected!
- Adjust security settings for the new location using caspol:

created a tiny script:

- cd %windir%\microsoft.net\framework\v2.0.40607
- caspol.exe -polchgprompt off
- caspol.exe -user -addgroup 1 -allcode Nothing -name "MyTestCodeGroup"
- caspol.exe -user -addgroup MyTestCodeGroup -url "file://C:/MyNewLocation/*" FullTrust -name "MyTestName"
- caspol.exe -polchgprompt on
- pause

(note: I prefixed the lines here with "- " te show you what is on one single line as the blog is breaking the lines)

- Test: try to run after changing security.... code did run!

Hmm that was easy! What could be done in 5 minutes I happened to do in 2 days... duh!

I hope you can learn something from this so you don't have to spend a lot of time doing wrong what I did wrong...

Remember that in this example I changed the security for the complete directory. It is possible to only trust the single DLL so don't worry about someone else putting some evilhack.dll's in that directory. All you need to do is change the script to only trust your own DLL.

VSTO 2005 Server Document Generation

Thursday evening I attended a great webcast presented by Andrew Clinick called:
MSDN Webcast: Server Document Generation in Visual Studio® Tools for Office last in a series of six webcasts about VSTO 2005

It had some excellent code samples and demos showing VSTO's Server Docs capabilities. In about 24 hours a recorded version will be available.

I can't wait to get my hands on the demo-code. They promised to release the code and announce it in the microsoft.public.vsnet.vstools.office newsgroup.

InsertXML

Researching VSTO2005 I stumbled over some 'hanging' behaviour when I'm inserting some XML into my Word document with the InsertXML function.

Simply inserting is working fine as long as no transformation is added (second param). Have to get into that a bit more, for now it's a bit unstable and not very documented at this point ;-) .... if anyone can get me some links?

GTD & SP2

This weekend I installed my first machine with XP SP2 to get a clue if it would break anything. I even turned on the Windows Firewall. Up to now it is all working OK and I'm only have been asked to allow opening up some things to this-or-that application.

Today I also finished the book: Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity a book from David Allen. He developed a system to Get Things Done. It was pointed out to me on the GTD section of Officezealot a website dedicated to Office development. Officezealot was promoted by one of the speakers (Andrew Whitechapel) of TechEd 2004. He had some great shows about VSTO2 aka VSTO2005.

I think the book can add some great benefits in organising your life. Let's try to focus on it for some time, and see if it will work out for me. My 'next action' will be clearing the 'Inbox' :-)

Information Bridge Framework 1.0 Demo

Received 'Information Bridge Framework 1.0 Demo and HOL VPC images' from Michael Kiselman today in an express delivery. It took only 5 days since I requested a copy of the demo on his Blog! I wish Amazon to ship that fast :-)

I am installing the demo as I am typing this.... it's likely that I won't make it today to have a look as it's after midnight and have to get up early to get into a meeting to discuss developing our new product based on VSTO2005.

XP SP2 Available for download

It's ready to get downloaded: Windows XP Service Pack 2

Go and get the bits, but bsure! One of the recommendations is to backup your harddrive :-)

GTD

Today, Sunday, I spent most of my time outside in my backyard sitting in the sun, reading a book. It's David Allen's book "Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity". He worked out a system to organize your life, things to do.

Microsoft Releases Windows XP Service Pack 2 with Advanced Security Technologies to Computer Manufacturers

Finally Microsoft releases XP-SP2:

Microsoft Releases Windows XP Service Pack 2 with Advanced Security Technologies to Computer Manufacturers

It will be in your Windows Update soon I expect.

DDay

Today, it was DDay (Daddy Day) for me. It started early when Mitch, 7 months, started screaming for a bottle of milk at 6:30AM.

Normally my wife Edith takes care of that so Kim, 2 years, and I can get some more sleep. Well, not today... She did not hear it, so I did it myself, half asleep... and back to bed. A little later... phone ringing. Edith had forgotten the keys to get into her beauty-centre and had to call the first client. She wanted me to look up the number of the client in order to make the call.

Ok... No sleeping today in the morning. Kim heard the phone ringing so she was right awake from that time.

The usual stuff for DDay... providing the foods, cleaning and entertaining the kids and get them to bed after lunch. This is the time I use for some computing, reading and other things a man can do without a bunch of screaming kids around...

Maybe tomorrow getting some nice hours of sleep in the morning? It sure would be nice!!