MS Word for FREE

Posted on March 30, 2008 by Patrick

I guess this headline sure caught your attention. Actually you still can’t go to Low Yat today and asked for a free copy, don’t even try come to 29th floor KLCC either!

You see, I just discovered that the last DOS based version of MS Word (v5.5) has been made available by Microsoft since 1999 after they released it as a Y2k fix.

You can download the program here. Below is a screen shot.

Office Live Workspace available worldwide

Posted on March 5, 2008 by Patrick

Microsoft just launch the beta version of Office Live Workspace after allowing pre-registration for US based customers few months ago. Good news is this time it is available worldwide. Goto this URL to sign in using your Windows Live/ Hotmail ID http://workspace.office.live.com/

Upon signing in you will get a screen as below, notice that there is an ‘Install Office Add-in’ button. This is a less than 1Mb .msi file download which gives you integration on Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

I look at Office Live Workspace as a online extension of the Office client. There is a personal document library for you which you also can share with other people. Then for Outlook you can synchronize your tasks, appointments, contacts and even notes on your workspace.

On the help file it stated that the integration is available for Office 2003 and XP as well. Cool, FREE new features for older version of Office product. How many vendor does that?

Integration with Office 2003

Integration with Office 2007

VSTO Reloaded

Posted on January 17, 2008 by Patrick

Today the MSE team did a Tech Preview to fellow developers on Visual Studio 2008 which actually available for MSDN subscribers late last year and is available for sales now.

My session is about Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) 2008 and a lot of productivity enhancements have been put inside the package in this current version. They include but not limited to:

Better UI Development on Office UI

Form Regions in Outlook
Custom Task Pane
Custom Ribbon for Excel, Word and PowerPoint.
No relearn, leverage on Windows Form Development skill
Windows Form able to host WPF app and extends this capability via Custom Task Pane

SharePoint Workflow development

No more manual writing of workflow.xml, feature.xml (both are SharePoint feature config files) and deployment script
Streamline development process from 15 steps to 3 steps in VSTO 2008

Word Content Control data binding with VSTO addin

Bringing unstructured data from Word documents to a structured world
Able to attach custom XML such as RosettaNet or UNeDoc which as industry based XML schema to Word data.

Easy deployment of VSTO – Office Addin via Click Once

No more reliant on CASPOL
Transparent to end users

I demo a cool VSTO addin for Word 2007 hosting a WPF user control with colossal effect and acting as a client to a WCF services at the back end. The data access is done using LINQ for XML. After that I will publish

It is based on an article in MSDN Dec 2007 issue but the source codes there is not working for RTM version of VS 2008. Many thanks for fellow MS staff Andrew Whitechapel for making it work for VS2008 RTM.

You can download the slides and working version of the source code here. They are hosted on Windows Live Skiydrive/ Folders.

Slides in PDF

Slides in XPS

Source Code in C#

I will come out with a tutorial for the SharePoint Workflow later and also a VB9 version of the source code. So stay tuned.