Creating Office 2003 PIA Sample Code Launcher
About this time last year, I got an email from a manager on the Office team, asking for help writing a bunch of managed code samples for Word and Excel 2003. Rather than simply write samples, I thought it would be cool to tie them all together in an environment that would allow you to try each one, as well. In addition, if going that far, why not make it so that anyone could add more samples to the test bed simply by dropping an assembly into a known folder?
The end product of this is the Office 2003 PIA Sample Launcher tool, available on GotDotNet. John Durant, "owner" of the Office Developer Web site, championed the project once we got it started. He provided a list of methods to be covered, and made sure things kept on track. It's important to mention Russ Nemhauser, who spent several days near the beginning of the project helping to design the architecture for the various assemblies, and the custom controls that provide the pages for method parameters.
If you want to write managed code that interacts with Word or Excel (including some Office components, as well), you might want to check out this demo. (To be honest, the product was named DemoRunner up until the last minute, because it can actually run any demo you throw at it, as long as you follow the rules setting up the demo code. If you do a lot of presentations, this is useful functionality. Brian Randell and I had written a similar, if slightly less-flexible, demo runner for VB6 presentations, and I had long been looking for a reason to write a demo-running application for .NET. This effort was that excuse!)
Check out John's blog entry here.
Download the application here.
Read John's article describing the tool here.