Craig Bailey

Blog

August 3, 2008

CLARITY: Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO)

By Craig Bailey
9 Min read
13 comments
03August

After chatting with a few people about Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) recently, it’s clear that the technology is not that well understood (even though, in my opinion, Microsoft have done a pretty good job of articulating it – much better than say OBA for example). So in this post I’m aiming to give a high level overview of VSTO and clear up some misconceptions. As usual this is...

August 2, 2008

Corneliu – Anti-spam email encoding tool

By Craig Bailey
1 Min read
Add comment
02August

I’ve been meaning to blog link this for ages, because I use it all the time but always have to go searching for the URL… So here it is, Corneliu’s most excellently helpful Anti-spam email encoding tool. Put in your email address and it’ll return a nice encoded one that most spam bots won’t recognise (sure the smarter they become the less effective this will be, but you’ve still got a...

August 2, 2008

Mojave Experiment thoughts

By Craig Bailey
2 Min read
2 comments

The Mojave Experiment has received a fair bit of attention in the last week or so. Some think it’s great, others deceptive. One comment I found interesting was Mary-Jo’s thought that if Apple had done this type of marketing they’d be getting applauded. Maybe. (As an aside, Adrian has a nice little discussion of whether the Mojave results are even valid.) Having pondered it a bit over the...

August 2, 2008

That useless Windows Shutdown dialog

By Craig Bailey
1 Min read
Add comment

Rick Strahl explains how to get rid of the Windows Server Shutdown Event Tracker dialog – you know, the annoying one that asks you to put in a reason every time you reboot. I have to admit I had no idea you could even get rid of it (but then again I never looked). One of the comments on the post gives a good case for why you’d want to leave it on, but for most of us (especially home users)...

August 2, 2008

Windows Live Tools for Visual Studio 2008

By Craig Bailey
1 Min read
Add comment

At Wednesday’s SBTUG James McCutcheon gave us a quick rundown on the latest CTP3 of the Windows Live Controls (download here). Neil Roodyn and Nick Randolph have each put together quick videos on a few of the controls – Silverlight Streaming in Neil’s case and Virtual Earth in Nick’s. The videos are short (approx 10 mins give or take), clear and interesting – worth a look. Neil, Nick...

August 1, 2008

AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft v2 Beta

By Craig Bailey
1 Min read
Add comment
01August

Last December I thought the idea of an AddOn Studio for WoW was amazing. And if you missed the Ken Levy interview about VSX on .Net Rocks then make sure you give that a listen – he goes in to a few details about it. What’s this got to do with VSX? The main thing is that the Wow AddOn Studio is its own standalone IDE built with VSX (here’s a brief overview of VSX if you’re interested)...

August 1, 2008

Uses for Live Mesh

By Craig Bailey
1 Min read
Add comment

I think I’m finally starting to get my head around Live Mesh. I have to admit to being under-whelmed at first (although in my defence I do think it was massively over-hyped when released), but articles like this one from ReadWriteWeb help clear things up. Sometimes the grand picture is hard to relate to, which is why having simple little Mesh scenarios like these can help. After reading each...

July 30, 2008

VSTO: VBA and VSTO

By Craig Bailey
3 Min read
Add comment
30July

As part of my preparation for presenting on VSTO (download slides here) at SBTUG this week I was asked a number of questions about how VBA and VSTO fit together. Things like: Is VSTO the VBA replacement? How do VSTO and VBA fit together? What is the benefit of learning VSTO? 10 million VBA developers? They’re important questions, after all there are reportedly 10 million VBA developers still...

July 28, 2008

VSTO: More on VS2008 SP1 enhancements

By Craig Bailey
1 Min read
Add comment
28July

More on the upcoming SP1 enhancements for VSTO: Eric Carter delves into some of the finer details, specifically with regard to using Word document level (and Excel workbook level) functionality in Application level add-ins. Also, in case you weren’t aware of the .NET Framework Client profile, here’s a quick rundown of what is included (thanks to Justin Van Patten). As the name suggests, the...

July 27, 2008

SBTUG: This Wed 30 July 2008 – Demo Fest, Office Business Applications + VSTO

By Craig Bailey
2 Min read
Add comment
27July

This Wednesday at the Sydney Business & Technology User Group (SBTUG) is looking really good with five demos scheduled. Yes, five! And I think we can still squeeze in one more if there’s anyone still undecided… When: This Wed 30 July 2008 Time: 6pm (until approx 8:30pm) Where: Microsoft, North Ryde Contact: Craig Bailey : 0413 489 388 Cost: Free (Pizza all provided) More details: www...

Craig Bailey

Archives