Friday, August 31, 2007

Microsoft Office Hotfix Installer

Office Hotfix Installer is designed to help administrators deploy update files within their organizations, by reading a series of deployment instructions contained in an INI file, and then using those instructions to apply an update to a computer. Office HotFix can also check applications on a computer to determine which updates need to be applied, and it can order a group of update files so that an installation is optimized.
XML Schema Designer for Visual Studio

XML Schema Designer - August 2007 CTP This first Community Technology Preview of the XML Schema Designer is a graphical tool for working with XML Schemas. This CTP introduces XML Schema Explorer - a tool that helps you navigate, search and work with schema sets, and automatically apears when you open or create an xsd file in Visual Studio. It is docked with the Solution Explorer tool.

Prerequisite: Download and install Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2. Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 2 is included in the installation.

Thursday, August 30, 2007

Create a Windows Installer Package for an Office 2007 Solution

Deploying Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office 2007 Solutions Using Windows Installer Learn how to deploy a Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System (also known as Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Second Edition, or VSTO 2005 SE) solution using a Visual Studio 2005 Setup project to create a Windows Installer package.

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

How To Export E-mail Messages to Access using VBA

From TechRepublic.Com blogger, Susan Harkins.

Exporting Outlook folders and their contents is a common and simple enough task most of the time using the Import And Export Wizard. But you can’t append records to an existing file using the Wizard. If you want to export frequently to the same database, or if you just want to take the process out of user hands, use VBA to automate the export. Article and Code
Today Only: Free Licensed Copy of Multi-Edit Lite

For today only from Giveaway of The Day, a free licensed copy of the fully featured code editor Multi-Edit Lite 2006. Supports VB, VBA, VB.NET, ASP, ASP.NEt, and more. Download

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Integrating Access Contacts with SharePoint and Outlook

The Access Team Blog has posted VBA code on using the new Add From Outlook feature in Access 2007 to work on a custom contacts table. This feature uses the same mechanism to determine that a table is a contact table, but more than that it needs to know how to map fields in your table to those in the Outlook contact store. This code will take any table, and make it into a contacts table. You just add the code to your solution, then update the table name and field names to reflect the fields in your custom contacts implementation, and run it.

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Office 2007 Add-in: Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS

This download from Microsoft allows you to export and save Office 2007 documents to the PDF and XPS formats. It also allows you to send email attachments in the PDF and XPS formats in a subset of Office 2007 programs.

You can now also copy and distribute the object code form of the add-in together and for use only with the Microsoft Office Access 2007 Runtime software, subject to the license terms accompanying the Microsoft Office Access 2007 Runtime software download.

Updated Links: Access 2007 Ribbon Customization

These are very useful resources:

Access Freak Access 2007 Tutorials
AccessRibbon.com
Ribbon Customizer

Thanks to robcooper of the Access Team Blog and Oli-S for these links.

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Ribbon Customization For Access 2007

Rob Cooper of the Access Team Blog, has posted a tip on creating item templates for Access 2007 Ribbon customizations.
SharePoint Server 2007 SDK: Software Development Kit

The Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 SDK contains conceptual overviews, “How Do I…?” programming tasks, developer tools, code samples, references, and an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) starter kit to guide you in developing solutions based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Office 2007 Sample: Building Server-Side Document Generation Solutions Using the Open XML Object Model

This download from Microsoft provides sample files in Microsoft Visual Basic.NET and Microsoft C# that show how to use the Open XML object model to assemble documents from a server-side application, and accompanies the following MSDN articles:

  • Building Server-Side Document Generation Solutions Using the Open XML Object Model (Part 1 of 2)
  • Building Server-Side Document Generation Solutions Using the Open XML Object Model (Part 2 of 2)
  • SQL Server Migration Assistant for Oracle V3.1

    SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) is a free suite of tools from Microsoft to reduce the effort, cost, and risk of migrating from Oracle to SQL Server. SSMA is said to automate almost every aspect of the migration process including assessment, schema and data migration, business logic conversion, and validation. Companies such as Motorola and Simon & Schuster have used SSMA to migrate their business-critical databases.

    Monday, August 20, 2007

    Access 2007 Navigation Pane Demo

    A new video demo on using the Access 2007 Navigation Pane has been published on the Office On-Line portal.

    You can also access these articles from the portal:

    Friday, August 17, 2007

    New Version of Ezy Documenter Premium

    Ezy Documenter Premium Edition New v6.1
    Add-In for Microsoft© Access 97 - 2007


    Standard Edition featured in Woody's Access Watch

    Ezy Documenter Premium automatically documents and prints in fully formatted Access reports all the objects in your Access database: tables and fields, table relations, query definitions, forms and record sources, reports and record sources, code modules, macros, data access pages, references, custom command bars, and database properties. Users can customize of each Ezy Documenter Database Report.

    New in v 6.0:

    • Linked table paths
    • Data Access Pages: name, linked URL, and Data Source
    • Custom Command Bars
    • All Database Object Properties

    New in v 6.1:

    • Updated GUI
    • Users can now select the export folder

    Only US$39.95 including free upgrades to new versions.

    Thursday, August 16, 2007

    MSDN Community Distribution CD August 2007

    The MSDN Community Distribution CD Image Download for August 2007 is now available for download (693mb)

    Wednesday, August 15, 2007

    Office 2007 SP1 Technical Preview Now Available

    From Bink.nu:

    Microsoft Office 2007 SP1 Technical Preview Available If you were a member of the Microsoft Office Product Evaluation TAP, you should now have access to the Microsoft Office 2007 System Service Pack 1 Technical Preview. Just log into Connect, and check under Microsoft Office. This is going to be a short one preview. Microsoft is only accepting feedback for about 30 days, so start downloading now!

    Thursday, August 09, 2007

    Access 2007 Database Engine

    The new Access 2007 database engine, which reads and writes .accdb files, is available as a redistributable EXE file (25mb) for those developers who need to code against the file directly, by-passing Access/VBA.

    The download installs a set of components that can be used by non-Microsoft Office applications to read data from 2007 Office system files such as Microsoft Office Access 2007 (mdb and accdb) files and Microsoft Office Excel 2007 (xls, xlsx, and xlsb) files. Connectivity to Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services and Text files is also supported.

    ODBC and OLEDB drivers are installed for application developers to use in developing their applications with connectivity to Office file formats.
    Latest Access Knowledge Base Articles

    Courtesy of KBAlertz.com:

    Access 2000

    935370 Issues that you may encounter when you open or are using a Microsoft Office Access database on a computer that is running Windows Vista
    934526 Description of the security update for Office 2000: May 8, 2007

    Access 2002

    932857 You may receive an error message when you try to install or run an Office program: "This patch package could not be opened" or "The installation source for the product is not available"
    927680 Error message when you try to create a database from a Visual SourceSafe project in Access 2003 or in Access 2002: "Failed to import file"
    927680 Error message when you try to create a database from a Visual SourceSafe project in Access 2003 or in Access 2002: "Failed to import file"

    Access 2003

    934151 Description of the Office 2003 post-Service Pack 2 hotfix package for Office 2003 Proofing Tools: March 12, 2007
    934182 Description of the Office 2003 post-Service Pack 2 hotfix package for the Italian thesaurus and for the Italian MUI: March 9, 2007
    932844 Description of the Office 2003 post-Service Pack 2 hotfix package: February 12, 2007
    932848 Description of the Office 2003 post-Service Pack 2 hotfix package for the Office 2003 proofing tools: February 21, 2007
    932841 Description of the Office 2003 post-Service Pack 2 hotfix package for the Italian MUI and for the Italian proofing tools: February 21, 2007
    932840 Description of the Office 2003 post-Service Pack 2 hotfix package for the Italian thesaurus, for the Italian MUI, and for Office 2003 Proofing Tools: March 6, 2007
    933734 Description of the Office 2003 post-Service Pack 2 hotfix package for the Italian version of Office 2003: March 1, 2007
    934180 Description of the security update for Office 2003: May 8, 2007
    936748 Issues that are fixed in Access 2003 by Office 2003 Service Pack 1
    New Office Developer Resources

    From Microsoft:

    Office 2003: Overview of Developer Technologies A white paper that presents an overview of developer technologies and tools to help enable solution developers to build custom solutions for Microsoft Office 2003 Editions.

    Office 2007: Developer Posters Download these posters to learn more about the new features of and enhancements to the 2007 Microsoft Office System.

    Tuesday, August 07, 2007

    SQL Server Magazine Events

    Upcoming Web Seminar

    Get the Most from DFS This web seminar on August 14, 2007 will cover what DFS is and how it works, the server and client OS versions that support DFS, how to configure DFS, the limitations of DFS, using DFS-N and DFS-R, as well as managing DFS. We will explain the basics of DFS and provide a quick "how-to" on implementing DFS-N and DFS-R in your Windows Server 2003 environment.

    On-Demand Web Seminars

    High Performance Connectivity for SQL Server 2005 and SSIS Learn how best-of-breed high-speed data interconnects to the new SSIS environment make plug-and-play with mainframe, legacy, Teradata, and other database systems a reality. These new connectors are drop-in solutions that are cost-effective, and provide best-of-breed bi-directional data movement.

    Keep Exchange Running - The High Availability Imperative If there is a "killer app", it's email. Business communications rely heavily on email, and an increasingly mobile base of users and clients continually lowers the tolerance for email downtime. Attend this informative eSeminar sponsored by CA XOsoft, and hear from Paul Robichaux, who will share helpful information that can help you meet your enterprise's HA needs. Register now so you won't miss out on this chance to learn how to keep your Exchange servers running — and what to do if disaster strikes.

    Keep Unsecured Machines Off Your Network Tune into the hottest up-to-date network security protection through this exclusive podcast featuring Windows IT Pro editor Karen Forster and Microsoft’s Ian Hameroff. Learn how Network Access Control (NAC) and Network Access Protection (NAP) work and what technologies are involved, as well as what third-party products are poised to work with these technologies.

    Monday, August 06, 2007

    Access 2007 Template Files Explained

    The MS Access Team Blog at Microsoft has posted a timely article explaining how the new format Access 2007 database ADDT template files work, and there is a tip on how you can create your own template with a button click! More

    I would also add that by renaming an ADDT to a ZIP, you can unzip any template into a folder hierarchy of the component objects, and you can then review/edit the individual XML documents .

    Friday, August 03, 2007

    CodePlex Portal for SQL Server

    Codeplex is the project hosting site for Microsoft SQL Server Samples and Community Projects. The portal catalogs samples included with Product Releases, samples from the community, and independent SQL Server Community projects.

    You can also download samples databases.
    The Product samples are the latest Microsoft samples released with Service Packs or major releases of SQL Server. Community samples are sample code and applications from Microsoft, MVPs, and the SQL Server community at large. There are release notes and brief descriptions of all the sample databases and code.