Eric'o'theque

Eric Richards' place of techno (as in technology) happiness, rants, and corporate love.

Browsing Posts published in June, 2006

Want to know about some of the deeper aspects of InfoPath integration in Office 2007? Here’s a good collection: Andrew May’s WebLog : InfoPath Forms in Office SharePoint Server 2007

This also includes pointers to:

  • Document Information Panel: understand InfoPath’s integration into Word / Excel / PowerPoint for editing the meta-data associated with the document.
  • Custom Document Information Panels: you can customize the meta-data InfoPath form and you can also add your own extra XML stream to a document with an associated InfoPath template.
  • Workflow forms: whew, stop your grinning and drop your linnen. How to customize the InfoPath rich / browser form associated with your work flow.

Actually, the master topic for that last bullet is here: InfoPath Forms for Workflows.

Here’s an excellent overview of how to use the new InfoPath designer feature to create a template part in InfoPath 2007: InfoPath 2007: Creating a Template Part.

What’s a good use for a template part? The blog post picks one of the best examples: contact information. Perhaps when you design your forms, you find yourself over and over again dealing with the same constructs (like, say, patient name and address information). You can design a template part to make that part of the form design quick.

Oh, man… I’m so sorry for all of our customers, partners, and Microsoft co-workers in Boston: TechEd Bus Drivers Go on Strike.

Here’s a one-stop collection of Microsoft InfoPath resources: Office Developer Center: InfoPath Community.

It even has – right now – a video of an amazing collection of good looking InfoPath team members introducing you to some of the new features in InfoPath 2007.

I’m still waiting and hoping that the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer game for Xbox will one day show up on the 360 backwards compatibility list… but I’m not holding my breath too much. I’m a big Buffy fan and it was a great game, though Willow looked a little scary.

I havemany found memories of playing it late into the night, all alone in Graham, with Bella up on the couch snuggled next to me and Beauregard sleeping down on the floor. They made it through lots of noises, but didn’t care for the howls of the vampire dogs.

At least Chaos Bleeds is available: Xbox.com Xbox 360 – Original Xbox Games on Xbox 360

Here’s an MSDN article to give you more of a taste of using the new hostable InfoPath control within a WinForm application: Hosting the InfoPath Form Editing Environment in a Custom Windows Form Application – by Mike Talley.

It includes a link to the sample application, too, showing how one would write a simple shell around the InfoPath form control.

One thing new that this article touches on is the Submit to Host data adapter: perhaps when the user presses “submit” you want your hosting infrastructure to do something with that resultant XML. This is basically a hosting specific adapter to let you do so.

Additionally, the article calls out some of the features not supported in hosted InfoPath. If this causes you grief, please blog about it or share with us your scenarios so that we can better understand what’s going on for you.

Powertoys WebLog : Consolas – a New Font for the Visual Studio 2005 Editor: “Consolas “

I’m trying this out to see how it does in my code editor. (Shh! It’s not VS2005)

Oh, no, now here comes this review of the SanDisk Sansa e2** series SanDisk Sansa e260 review – Engadget: they likie!

I think I’ll just need to see if I can download the manual and then play with it. I want it a lot less given that work handed out some very nifty tiny 1GB MP3/WMA players. Perhaps if I can get a good deal…