Why Office must be a software development platform or Why did it take us so long to understand

Hi...

being on the Office / Vista Launch Roadshow in Germany brought some new insides. Fascinating ideas after all. Read this...

With Visual Studio Tools for Office, Microsoft made Office a real platform for client applications. This is very reasonable, why?? Because it is already reality!!

If you have a look around in today's companies most of them tell you that Excel or Powerpoint is more than necessary to run their business. They rely on those applications. Most of them started to use VBA to automate some processes which then got bigger and bigger. Today most of them build really large applications using VBA here and some Excel there and a database in behind. This was so convenient and successful on the firsthand that it totally made sense from a user perspective.

From an IT perspective VBA was never designed to be a full blown development platform. The code is tied to the document, hard to manage, several parallel versions in the wild. Development is getting harder the bigger things get. Let alone the fact that different versions of Office are most of the time not compatible in all details.

In my opinion (and I have to check this if I have the chance) nobody at Microsoft really saw this in the first place. Instead we made a macro editor which simply was to strong as a "normal" macro language and too "weak" to be a full blown programming environment. But our customers wanted the full blown version and we added here and there a bit and didn't get the clue why.

It makes sense to see Office as a development platform. It can be the client for a SOA environment by providing strong capabilities which do require no extra efforts in the backend (think about what Excel can do with your financial data. Would you want to develop only a tenth of that in your web based user interface??).

What we need is full blown programming environment and the possibility to exchange data with the backend. VSTO with .net and web services along with XML seems pretty cool to me.

To be very frank on this: It seems that to understand this it took quite some time.

Once again things are so easy when listening to the guys working everyday with the things...

CU

0xff

PS: Greetings from Redmond ;-)