As part of the MSDN Roadshow, I briefly demo Document Information Panels in the Office 2007 applications.  At each venue I've visited so far, people have wanted to talk to me about this stuff.  At the Harrogate venue, one attendee asked "how would I learn that this stuff existed, if I didn't already know about it?" and that's got me thinking...

We spend most of our time assuming that developers have a problem that they want to solve, and we try to give them ideas as to how they can use our products and technologies to do that.  I guess it's reasonable since the problem normally comes before the solution :-)  On the other hand, I think sometimes it's good for us to say "look, here's a load of technology you could use" and people will go away and innovate based on what's possible, rather than what's necessary.

I know, necessity is the mother of invention, but simple "awareness of what's there" could be invention's live-in uncle.

With that in mind, and as a direct response for that attendee in Harrogate, this post attempts to give some pointers, specifically for Office 2007, as to where to look to discover what's there...

1. What's in the Product

For this you really need to visit the main product pages at http://microsoft.com/office. The Products page gives you a simple list of what you get in Office 2007, but for a really nice view of what's possible I quite like the Demos page.  It contains some short videos that show what can be done with Office.  None of this is overtly developer-oriented, but developers need to know what's "in the box" too.

Many developers are only light users of the Office apps (I am, that's for sure).  For a good view of what real Office users want to do, an occasional look at the Crabby Office Lady is worthwhile.

2. Developer Documentation

If you're going to write code that works with Office, you'll want proper developer documentation.  Your first port-of-call should be the Office Developer Center on MSDN.  From there you can link off to pages that specifically target individual Office apps, such as Outlook, InfoPath, and Word.  There's also a page of links specifically around Visual Studio Tools for Office, which most new Office developers will want to use.

It's worth emphasising that these pages on MSDN are not static, they contain headline items that are updated regularly to reflect new information of interest to Office developers.

3. Community Perspective

Naturally, you'll want to hear the views of Microsoft and non-Microsoft people.  There's a thriving Office-development community out there.  Here are lists of Office Blogs, Newsgroups, and Videos (including Channel9).

I think anyone that digests a good proportion of the information I've linked to here, and keeps abreast of the various feeds present in these pages, will be very well-placed to develop modern Microsoft Office applications.