The new phone books are here, the new phone books are here...

Bill Sheldon — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 17:27:00 GMT

This is one of those 'hey look at me' posts that always make me feel like... well if you recognize the title of the movie that the quote which is the title of this movie comes from - that pretty much sums it up.

Anyway a few 'ads'.

First off, I have a new article available over at SQL Magazine. It's a very introductory article to LINQ for SQL so if you are looking for a good starting point for just getting started with LINQ, here's a short article that might be of assistance: http://www.sqlmag.com/Article/ArticleID/98205/sql_server_98205.html

The second item fits the post a bit better. Back in the first Quarter I signed on to do another book - yes my wife is ready to kill me - which since she is pregnant get's the pregnancy multiplier (we're currently around 7 or 8 so the danger level is getting pretty high). At any rate if you are interested it's still way out in the future - like October 2008 - if "we" (me) make "our" (my) final due date - here is the page: http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0470377313/105-1544171-6096430

As you can note on that page this next book is an Office Business Applications book. Of note, it will have both C# and VB samples (ok VB sample - but more on that later) and covers using WPF with Outlook Form Regions and Excel not to mention server side document generation. That's the good news - the bad news - well I'm late on my chapters - of course that's pretty typical for me - the question is can I catch up in the next few weeks - especially given the increasing pregnancy multiplier...

Finally, I thought I should mention that my last book is finally getting read to be available. At 1600 pages it pretty much is a phone book, and it should ship for the first week of May which apparently is fast approaching: http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Visual-Basic-2008-Evjen/dp/0470191368/ref=sr_1_1

The Next Application Paradigm - OBA

Bill Sheldon — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 17:23:00 GMT

So in the past I've written articles that talk about how the web as an application model is peaking for certain types of application models. Specifically that while the 'reach' of web applications - ie. the way that even now I can be sitting in a Del Taco in Riverside (where it is 108 degrees farenheit) updating my blog just prior to heading over for a user group meeting, provide a powerful paradigm. This isn't going to disappear and isn't to be discounted, but it isn't enough. New technologies such as Silverlight and WPF will help extend the life of the web as a UI, but the reality is, web services allow me to use a rich client vs. a web site for editing my comments and then just submit the data to the server.

Most enterprise applications (as opposed to public facing) continue to be rich client applications. In the future there will still be many such applications which are written from the ground up, expecially those which are focused more on sizzle then steak. But I feel that the new paradigm for actual business applications will be to leverage someone else's User Interface for much of the framework with a minimalist custom set of controls. A couple years ago the common 'UI design pattern' we heard from smart client customers was for them to ask for a user interface based on Outlook. This is still the case but things are shifting, you see instead of asking for a client based on Outlook - instead we are starting with Outlook as the client and just customizing it for the needs of the organization.

Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) have been around since .NET 1.x but as I have been informed many times - haven't really taken off as some expect. However, like so many things, until the rest of the infrastructure to support a technology is in place even a great tool gets only limited use. In the past VSTO has primarily focused on the document. Specifically it started as a replacement for VBA and the document centric customizations of VBA and Macros... but with Office 2007 and Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas) - well this isn't the same model.

An OBA is an Office Business Application, in short it is an architectural model which leverages the full Office System to implement custom business solutions. The first key enabling technology is of course SharePoint aka Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. I'm not a big fan of SharePoint as a development platform, but as a host for documents and document templates it is unparalleled. By marrying key document templates with a web site you gain the benefit of a web application with a rich client. I'll post more in the future on some of the key enabling technologies which can then be built on this - think about Add-In's and custom message contents but the key is now that we have a solid server combined with a host of new tools the OBA model leveraging VSTO is a very viable solution framework.

Don't think so - well take a close look at Team System. Team Explorer is in part an OBA, yes there is a 'custom' add in for Visual Studio which isn't part of Office - however, I know for a fact that when I start working with tasks, work items, bugs etc. in TFS I do it all with Excel. Why because Team Explorer's custom interface pieces aren't natural to me, but the add-ins for Excel and the way that the forms are hosted on SharePoint and retrieve and update data from SQL Server provide me a user interface which is effective. So when you are thinking about how to engineer that next big smart client application don't discount the value of being able to leverage the Office System as the plumbing for much of what you'll do.

Tonight I'll be presenting on a demo OBA solution which InterKnowlogy helped Microsoft develop to highlight some of the new features of VSTO 2008. This is a powerful architecture and I'm expecting to do additional presentations similar to the one I'm doing tonight for the Inland Empire .NET User Group. I grabbed a screen shot of their homepage describing tonight's presentation iedotnetug_org.JPG (172.5 KB) but feel free to visit their site (http://www.iedotnetug.org) or stop in for a meeting in the future.