Work:

Been working on a Visual Studio Tools for Office application most of last week and on Friday evening we got the chance to demo it to Catherine Heller a technical Evangelist who works closely with the VSTO team.  This is all part of the early adopter program we are on as a company.  I think she liked what she saw which was cool as I would image she does see some good solutions.  We also took the opportunity to fire a few more of our pain points to her so she can relay them to the VSTO team.  We are on track though with our ideas and have workarounds for some of the issues that we have already found.

As a C# developer it’s sometimes a bit of a pain working with the Word object model mainly due to the optional parameters for the object model.  If you do not want to pass anything you still have to pass an object variable of System.Type.Missing. EG:

object m = System.Type.Missing;
myWordApp.MethodWithOptionalParameter(ref m);

Then I found out via a blog from one of the VSTO team that VSTO actually declares a variable for me to use in this situation called missing so I can use this:

myWordApp.MethodWithOptionalParameter(ref missing);

Of course this does not get away from the fact that if I used VB.Net that I could omit it altogether but at least it helps.

It was interesting at the Office Dev Conference that they actually turned around and recommended using VB for office development, obvious I suppose really.

Rest:

You’ve got to see this http://www.attackchi.org.au/kits.htm I wonder what I could disguise my beardie as?

Play:

Went for a sail on Saturday as my son was having the final ;ess on of a 6 week course he was on.  Took a little Topper out to the far end of the lake and then panicked as they started a race and I had about 20 boats heading in my direction.  I managed to keep clear but got myself in a part of the lake with no wind.  “Where did I put those paddles?”  My lad got his certificate so he was pleased with himself. 

I also found out some interesting news on Saturday night.  The gym I am a member of is based on a really old country estate, well on this estate there is a lovely old lake.  Apparently my gym membership allows me to take out the rowing boat they have tied up there and fish the lake.  The oars are in the reception area so I need to find out a bit more about this as the lake looks absolutely stunning and I can picture myself sitting on the boat in the middle of the lake.