I finished up my speaking tour for the Heroes Happen Here product launch of Windows Server, Visual Studio and SQL Server 2008 about 25 minutes ago here in my home town of St. Louis. The audience was great. I hope you enjoyed the talk and thanks to you all for your attention and the great questions. I hope you enjoy the t-shirts!

I'm actually sitting in the front row at the launch as I write this watching Clint Edmonson talk about occasionally connected applications (OCAs) and the synch framework. As promised, you can download the deck that I showed you today here.

Also, just to make things easy, here are the links from my resource slide at the end of my presentation:

• Install of Visual Studio 2008 Trial Edition
• Visit the Office Developer Forum
• Visit the Office Developer Center
• Download the Evaluation Materials

As a follow-up to the gentleman who asked me a question about downloading Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) and installing it in Visual Studio 2008, unfortunately, that isn't currently possible. I know everyone who attended the launch received a copy of VS2008 Standard which doesn't support VSTO at this time. Hopefully, you'll have access to the Professional version of VS2008 so you can try out some of the techniques we talked about this afternoon.

Again, please feel free to leave any questions in the comment section below or send me an email!

The International Organization for Standardization, or ISO (yeah, I can't figure out that acronym either), posted a press release on their web site Tuesday  announcing that ISO/IES DIS 29500, or Office Open XML, received well more than the minimum number of votes by the international community to become an official ISO standard. While ISO has not officially approved Open XML as an international standard, it received 86% approval, well above the 66.6% needed for approval.

Open XML may very well be one of the most significant recent technical standards that you haven't heard much about. For a starter course with links out to important resources, check out this post I did a couple of weeks ago on this very subject.

The official Microsoft statement on the ratification comes from Tom Robertson, General Manager of Interoperability and Standards:

With 86 percent of voting national bodies supporting ratification, there is overwhelming support for Open XML. This outcome is a clear win for customers, technology providers and governments that want to choose the format that best meets their needs and have a voice in the evolution of this widely adopted standard. The input from the technical experts, customers and governments around the world has greatly improved the Open XML specification and will make it even more useful to developers and customers. Once it is formally approved, we are committed to supporting this specification in our products, and we will continue to work with standards bodies, governments and the industry to promote greater interoperability and innovation.

Open XML has been an open standard for years. In fact, a slew of software vendors already support it their products. These products include Microsoft Office (2007, 2003, XP, 2000), OpenOffice Novel Edition, Gnumeric, Neo-Office 2.1, WordPerfect 2007 and the PalmOS.

This ratification is important to developers and architects worldwide. The standardization of word processing, spreadsheet and presentation documents will:

1. Provides customers with much more choice -- they can make software purchasing solutions based not on existing file formats, but which office productivity software has the best features for the best price.
2. Allow developers can create applications on the desktop, the server and mobile devices that generate documents that they know, with confidence, will be readily consumed by their information workers' software.

In very much the same way we look to standards-based technologies like web services to allow us to interoperate between systems built to run on different platforms, developers and architects must begin to think the same way about business documents. Adoption of Open XML allows technology providers to focus on building the best software solution possible without having to worry about the formatting minutia of multiple different consuming applications.

And how can that be a bad thing?

At both the Kansas City and Minneapolis Windows Server/Visual Studio/SQL Server product launches, I've presented a breakout session called Creating Instantly Recognizable Application with the Microsoft Office System. It has given me a really good opportunity to dig into developing custom applications in the Office client applications as well as customizing SharePoint Server and, ultimately, tying the two systems together to create a true "software plus service" solution. I have to say, this stuff absolutely rocks!

One thing I've learned in the past several weeks is that is has never been easier to develop, test and deploy MOSS applications. There are several reasons for this:

• Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) is integrated into Visual Studio 2008 and offers a very rich set of project types for all the Office products
• VSTO provides a SharePoint workflow project type -- this is the same as a typical Workflow Foundation project (SharePoint uses WF as its workflow engine) except that it has all the SharePoint specific hooks built in that allows for one-click deployment and debugging
• For Office 2007 applications, VSTO now provides a visual design tool for ribbon add-in applications
• The developer experience for building Office Business Applications (OBAs) is exactly the same as building any other WinForm or ASP.NET application in Visual Studio

If you've developed an application in Visual Studio before, you can have an OBA application up and running in virtually no time. If you want to get some hands-on experience from the professionals, I'm glad to let you know that there will be a MOSS Camp in St. Louis this coming Saturday, April 5th. To get all the details, including the topics for the day, check out the announcement post on Clint Edmonson's web site. This is a community driven event being given my the St. Louis SharePoint User Group.

If you read this blog regularly, I usually try to tackle relatively big topics and wax philosophical on any number of topics, thus the tag line "A Shotgun Approach to architecture." But this post will be different in that I'm actually providing some useful, hands-on information. Imagine that, from an architect even.

I've been talking to audiences a lot lately about building customer applications, or add-ins, for Microsoft Office using Visual Studio 2008. In this vastly expanding world of software plus services, Office stands as an excellent example of extending the base functionality of an existing piece of software to meet individual user needs in an environment that is instantly recognizable and comfortable for them.

Installing add-ins for Outlook 2007 using Visual Studio 2008 is a piece of cake -- simply code, build and deploy. In fact, your add-ins are installed into Outlook as part of the debugging process as well.

While this is cool and simple to use, it can have some undesired results, like having half finished or abandoned projects sitting in Outlook throwing errors every time you read or compose email. I actually ran into this problem this last week after doing some demos at the Windows Server/Visual Studio/SQL Server 2008 product launch in Kansas City.

I quickly discovered that there is no automatic way to uninstall these add-ins once they're installed, at least none that I was able to find. Ultimately, I discovered how to remove them and it requires a simple trip into the Windows registry ( oh joy!).

First, you'll need to open the registry editor and drill down to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins. When you open this key, you'll see a list of sub-keys, each of which represent an add-in for Outlook.

Simply find the key for the add-in you wish to uninstall and delete it. You will, of course, need to restart Outlook for the change to take place.

And the good news is that the process is identical for Word and Excel as well.

Hopefully add-in management will be better integrated into Office in future version. For now, this simple process should get you where you need to go.

I had the privilege of presenting Building Instantly Recognizable Applications with the Microsoft Office System at the Windows/Visual Studio/SQL Server 2008 launch in Kansas City, KS today. I had a great time and am grateful to the outstanding audience for your attention and excellent questions.

As I am a man of my word, here are the resource links from my slide deck for those of you wanting to learn more about how to start developing applications for Office:

• Install of Visual Studio 2008 Trial Edition
• Visit the Office Developer Forum
• Visit the Office Developer Center
• Download the Evaluation Materials

Also, I had several requests after my talk for my slide deck, so I've made it available for download it here.

If you were at the talk today and have comments or questions, please feel free to email me to post a comment below. Enjoy the materials and thanks again for attending the launch event today!