Craig’s Musings

(Part 4, Part 3, Part 2, Part 1)

Potential issues/challenges/opportunities to be aware in developing a managed add-in for Office:

• Tim Anderson: It’s hard to write a fully-fledged Windows Forms application without a dash of PInvoke (e.g. integration with HTML Help). Brad Abrams refers to a PInvoke mapping post made by the C# team. John Lam wonders why anyone would want to use C# for interop.
• Tim Dawson has made freely available some excellent Windows Forms controls. RSS Bandit, for example, uses the non-commercial SandBar toolbars and menus in its UI. It’s important to note that RSS Bandit can do so since it’s freeware.
• Developing Software in Visual Studio .NET with Non-Administrative Privileges
• Joseph Cooney has a smarter resize for Windows Forms.
• The Smart Client Offline Application Block was finally released (as announced here). As I mentioned before, this block is well-accompanied by David Hill’s well-written piece on smart clients. David recently gave an overview webcast on this subject, too; he also points out a case study on a medical diagnosis smart client application.
• Clarification on FileDialog documentation
• It’s all about the user, reminds Eric Sink in his MSDN piece.
• Single Sign-On Enterprise Security for Web Applications
• Add images and font support to your menu via an extender provider component.

From the aggregator mailbag:

• Chris Anderson finds that MVC often leads to over-architected applications.
• Hopefully we’ll see continued enhancement to Adam Nathan’s CLR SPY tool. As someone who already relies on FxCop’s static analysis, I’m interested in CLR SPY’s dynamic analysis support. Speaking of revisions to software, FxCop is due for one.
• Dare posts his RSS Bandit TODO list.
• Jason Bock’s reusable .NET Error Dialog received some discussion.
• Chris Pratley talks about the Watson approach to software quality (i.e. let’s measure it). More importantly, Microsoft offers Watson data freely for anyone writing applications on Windows. Chris continues to explore the following counter-intuitive concept, here: The goal is to ship a product with the highest known quality, not necessarily with fewer bugs.
• John Lam reminds us that code coverage tells us only about faults of commission, not faults of omission. He’s also been having fun with the Shadows & Highlights feature in Photoshop CS.