In the News
The first annual Office Developer Conference was held in Redmond, Washington last week and it was clear from the BillG keynote that Office is becoming the premier Smart Client platform. I counted at least 4 references from Bill Gates to Office as a platform. The conference had 800 people that signed up, but 1,300 people actualy attended. The keynote and the VSTO demo video was currently unavailable.
VSLive - .NET: Coming of Age in 2005
Smart Client and Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) take center stage at VS live.
S. "Soma" Somasegar Corporate Vice President Microsoft Developer Division keynote speaker says"
Get Smart
Somasegar says a key component of continuing this momentum is creating "connected systems" that work together by using smart clients. "Let's take the best from the Web client world and the best from the rich client world, and—voila! —you have a smart client," Somasegar says. Smart clients can allow several applications to share code with one another while using minimal resources, eliminating the need to duplicate coding efforts; essentially, if one application requires a piece of code existing already in another application, it simply can request the code to be sent over. "The cheapest piece of code is the piece of code that you don't have to write in the first place," Somasegar says, as smart clients provide interoperability through Web services and leverage existing investments. "Enabling developers to reuse existing assets is a key design goal." The end result of using a smart client, ultimately, is a rich user experience that requires using minimal resources."
Soma is a knowledgeable leader that has impressed me on many occasions and it is great to hear him speaking about Smart Client concepts as well as VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office). And I'm not just saying that because it's review time :-)
VSTO is my current passion that is delivering a Smart Client customization framework for Microsoft Office. VSTO leverages the power of existing applications like Excel and Word and extends their functionality individually, as well as bringing Office applications together, to build a platform of collaborative applications.