Editor's Note
Get Ready For Microsoft Office 2003
Over the years, we've celebrated a lot of anniversaries in this column. Who can forget our "Ten Years of ENIAC!" Editor's Note back in June 1957? Or the "How Far We've Come: Five Years of the Altair 8800" issue back in January 1980? Or even the "Macintosh Interface: 15 Years Without an Update" Editor's Note page just four years ago?
Well, if you're expecting another one of those goofy anniversary columns, you can forget it right now. Instead, this Editor's Note marks another milestone: it's the first page written for the magazine using Microsoft Office Word 2003 (at least, that's its current codename). This is, at last count, the 11th word processor that's been used in the creation of an Editor's Note for MSDN Magazine and its predecessors. We've used 'em all—from Notepad to Word for MS-DOS to the original WinWord to today. There might even have been a WordStar or WordPerfect in there at one point, although our records don't go back that far.
You'll be seeing more about Microsoft Office 2003 in the months to come, here and elsewhere. There's a raft of new developer-centric stuff in there. You can order a prerelease copy today from https://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/orderbeta.asp.
Office 2003 still supports Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) projects unchanged, for the most part, from Office XP. However, you'll also be able to write Visual Basic .NET or C# code and run it from within Office 2003. This will actually take the form of a new technology codenamed "Visual Studio Tools for Office." Why is this a big deal? In addition to the existing VBA macro technology, you'll get the full benefit of the Visual Studio .NET environment: language improvements like structured exception handling, inheritance, and polymorphism; visual UI design; XCOPY deployment of Office code; and connection to the Internet and to data through integrated XML-based Web Services functionality.
Word 2003 and Excel 2003 will expand upon the XML support found in Word 2002 (which was limited to saving HTML format with XML data islands). In Word 2003, you'll be able to create and save actual XML documents in several formats, including documents that conform to XML schemas. In addition, you'll be able to apply XSL transforms to your XML data as you're saving it.
A third component of Office 2003 that will hold lots of interest for power users and developers will be Microsoft InfoPath, which will provide a brand new GUI-driven way of creating, filling out, and submitting XML-based forms. The user doesn't even have to know that they're using XML! Developers will be able to write business layer code to process the XML data that's been entered, design new forms, and even create templates. The package comes with a bunch of precreated business forms, like the old favorite Travel Itinerary, as shown here.
The final new feature of Office 2003 that we have the space to point out here is its built-in support for XML-based Web Services. You can already do this to some extent with the Office XP Web Services Toolkit 2.0, but this will be available as an Office 2003 add-on. Integrating an XML-based Web Service into your Office 2003 solution will be as easy as selecting the appropriate Web Service reference from a dialog, just as you can with Visual Studio .NET. Since advanced XML support will be baked into the product, you'll be able to take advantage of these Web Services within Office-based VBA solutions just as you make use of COM libraries today.
In upcoming months, we'll be discussing Office 2003 (or whatever its final name may be) here. To prepare for all this excitement, you should refamiliarize yourself with XML-based Web Services and how to use them in Visual Studio .NET. You can also check out the new Office 2003 center on MSDN Online. Happy testing!
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