MSOS DevCon, Word XML, and the Mvp.Xml Project

I was invited, but unfortunately due to scheduling conflicts I was unable to attend this years Microsoft Office System Developer Conference in Redmond this past week. My loss as Bill Gates gave the keynote about the importance of XML, connectivity, ease of development, lower CTO, better performance, extreme developer tools (VS2005 is just plain freakin' amazing, my words not his) and the importance of reuse and leveraging both 3rd party and MS developers to build interopabile solutions. The great thing (from my perspective) is that SharePoint is being positions at the core of most of the products which means lots more development and collaboration to come.

Mike Fitzmaurice gave a presentation about how SharePoint can be used to access backend data services (SAP, Siebel, PeopleSoft, etc.) including some discussion around BizTalk, SSO (Single Sign On), etc.

I think one of the key things is to look at storing Word, Excel, etc. files in XML when saving stuff in SharePoint rather than the traditional DOC, XLS, etc. formats. I noticed the recently released (2/4/2005) Word XML Software Developers Kit which follows the Office XML Reference Schemas that were published awhile ago. Displaying Word XML docs in a browser (via SharePoint and an XSL file) is so much better on performance than launching embedded Word and you've got so much more power like loading it up into an XmlDocument and modifying it rather than the traditional Word COM fiasco.

On the Xml front, you might also want to check out the Mvp.Xml project here which is aimed at supplementing .NET framework functionality available through the System.Xml namespace. Helps a lot when you're working with Xml Web Services coming out of SharePoint.