Patrick’s Bytes

Microsoft just keeps on raining goodies at Office Developer Conference 2008 that I am holding back notifications to my partners/ developers until it’s over. No wonder they got extra activities on weekends for sleepless attendees!

The new VSeWWS 1.1 just got release and there is a host of new features besides bug fixes. You still got to run it on Visual Studio 2005 but already confirmed that VSeWSS 1.2 will support Visual Studio 2008 and aimed to be released June 2008!!

1. My favorite feature - Visual Basic support !!

2. WSP view for WSP Editing - Not possible previously where you can modify features.xml before deploying to SharePoint server

3. New item templates

4. F5 no longer do IISReset but only app pool refresh, so faster debugging

You can download the installer and the user guide here. More details at SharePoint team blog.

FedEx’s David Zanca did a demo of their Quickship application at Bill Gates’ keynote at Office Developer Conference. You can check out Bill Gates’ keynote recording here.

FedEx Quickship is a great example on how Office Business Applications can enhanced collaboration and user’s productivity. They have leverage the following OBA features:

1. Quickship toolbar inside Microsoft Outlook 2003/2007.

2. Printing and doc gen to FedEx Kinkos from Word 2007

3. Quickship site template for SharePoint 2007

4. Integration with Office Live

I got the pictures from John Mullinax’s blog. More details here. Some features only available to FedEx customers in US, but you can get a feel of the OBA app with their Flash demo here.