Technical Evangelist, Add-in Express 2010 for IE and news from “office” fields
This post is in fact a copy of the newsletter that I sent out yesterday. I have to admit the newsletter was quite a success and brought the results much better than I had hoped for :) But let’s not put the cart before the horse, first comes a story…
The story
Friedrich II the Great, King of Prussia, won one of his numerous battles due to his mistake. Exactly so, a mistake… The day was drawing to a close. The dark was slowly falling down the valleys between the Silesian mountains enveloping the valleys and the mountains themselves with its evening freshness. Two armies stood face to face, Prussian and Austrian, frozen in expectation of the great battle that was to begin in the first light heralding the dawn. But the Prussian king, their Great Fritz was not there. The king was in a big hurry. Whipping up his horse ruthlessly, he drove and drove his guard and his suite to his beloved army. He was in a great rush. But in haste, he made a mistake and took the wrong road. And the road he took led him directly to the Austrian headquarters… Oops! The amazement of Austrian generals knew no limit, and self-control of that great key knew no limit either. Without batting an eyelid he got down the horse and standing at the head of his far from numerous suite, suggested that his enemies should surrender. And they did believe him. And how could they not believe the confident calm of the king, to the feet of which French, Austrian and Russian banners were thrown down not once. So, they yielded their swords obediently, after that they had a hearty supper with the king and his suite and went to bed. And in the morning… In the morning Friedrich woke up as a true victor…
How great it would be if I went to bed tonight, and tomorrow in response to the newly opened position on the Job Openings page, I’d find out some appealing CVs in my Inbox… :)
Add-in Express Evangelist wanted!
Exactly so! Where but among the developers who use our products shall I look for the right person? A rhetorical question, never mind. Well, you can find the details about the position on the Job Openings page. I’m just going to highlight a few points to you here. This is a remote job and you can combine it with your main job pretty well, whether you work for a large corporation (or course, if it is permitted by your contract) or are a free lancer and develop your own add-ins based on Add-in Express. If you need more information or have any questions, you know my e-mail and you are the most welcome! I want to emphasize that the main requirement is the ability to tell stories, or rather make them up ;-) Oh no, the story about Friedrich is the true one! I just re-read it the other day :)
Well, let’s get to the next item…
Add-in Express 2010 for IE – update 1
While our entire team were struggling during long winter nights with the problem of the social connector in Outlook 2003 – 2010, as well as with some other unexpected difficulties in Office 2010 (for instance, a remarkable Backstage view with its raw scheme), Sergey Grischenko prepared the first update of ADX 2010 for IE. The main thing on board is the complete support for Visual Studio 2010 RC, which was implemented in response to the persistent warning from the Visual Studio Team that they would remove all programs not supporting VS2010 RC from Visual Studio Gallery. A couple of bug fixes are there as well. You can download the update here.
Our sample add-in Advanced Search for IE (source code is included) has also undergone substantial changes. In this add-in, Sergey and Eugene Astafiev showed all the capacities of Add-in Express with regard to interthread and interprocess communications provided in version 2010. Download it and have a close look at the sources – I guarantee that you will discover some new tricks.
Besides that, Sergey not being very enthusiastic about Add-in Express for IE descriptions on our web-site that definitely lack colors, published some of his thoughts about the product. You can look through them here. You can also give Sergey a portion of criticism there (or bestow accolades for such a courageous step :)
News from “office” fields…
I am speaking about Add-in Express 2010 for Office. I am pretty sure that an interested reader has noticed that at the beginning of the previous piece of news I spoke about difficulties. Yes, there are some, but we fit quite well into the roadmap declared earlier. Of course, if Microsoft does not give us some surprise in RTM. However, I want to draw your attention to the fact that our beta 1 will support all new features of Office 2010, but will include the base designers only. That’s why, please, do not expect a WYSIWYG for the Backstage view from us at this stage. All the more, the whole thing is designed a bit too intricate, so you can expect designers only in the release. Nevertheless, even on beta 1, you can rebuild your add-ins in VS2005 or VS2008 that are at your disposal and get support for Office 2010. You can find more details in my post about Visual Studio 2010, Office 2010 and Add-in Express 2010.
A few times I received questions about our Outlook Security Manager 2010. We are already testing its internal beta and, apparently, will publish it together with beta 2 of ADX for Office or a bit earlier (including the support for x64).
Our support service news
Andrei Smolin, looking at Sergey, could not but put his two cents and got on with rebuilding the entire support section on our web-site. You can find the result here. I believe that we will add a ticket-based support system to customary forum and e-mail very soon, which will formalize all our premium services and make them more comfortable. I guess our long-term premium subscribes already forgot about the quantity and, above all, the quality of services they are subscribed to and are eligible for during the whole term of their subscription. FYI, a comparison list of services included in different packages is available on the feature matrix pages and here.
Very few of you apply for sample projects, which we usually publish on our blog – howto and video howto sections. Please pay attention that we created the Support service resources map, where you can contemplate a nearly complete picture of our support service activities. By the way, you can look straight in our digitized eyes on the updated Team page.
Oops… I see that I’m exceeding all reasonable limits in the volume of my writing. Merci beaucoup to everyone who’ve read to the end!