I encountered an interesting problem while working with our FirstPoint Office add-in (one of the many joys of working with the Office API!).

In this case, a call to ActiveDocument.CanCheckIn() would return true, even when the value was clearly false. Testing in the VB macro editor in Word would return the correct value consistent and so would invoking the method from the Visual Studio command window.

In Word 2007, this API call seems to work just fine. However, in Word 2003, I had to use reflection to invoke the method to get a proper result:

Type type = _host.ActiveDocument.GetType();
MethodInfo m = type.GetMethod("CanCheckin");
object result = m.Invoke(_host.ActiveDocument, null);
canCheckInDocument = Convert.ToBoolean(result);

Okay, maybe "death" is a bit severe.  But certainly, I think in the next few years (if not months), Office will start to lose marketshare...significantly.

Now don't get me wrong; I love Office (okay, not really, but I work with it on a daily basis and the whole product strategy for my group revolves around the Office client and server suite), but there are some severe usability issues which have, amazingly, to this day, been pretty much unresolved.

The crux of the shortcomings of Office (aside from interoperability pre-12) is really document sharing.

Today, in the Office world, if you want to share documents (either with yourself (i.e. work on a different machine) or others), you really only have a few options:

1. You can access your desktop remotely using a remote desktop client.  This sucks for a variety of reasons including responsiveness and the require setup to enable a remote access scenario.  It may not even be possible due to corporate firewalls.
2. Email the document to yourself and/or collaborators.  This is what most people do today, I would gather.  It's one of the most annoying things that I deal with because I end up with a folder with a bunch of documents title "Spec rev.1", "Spec rev.2" and so on.  Not to mention what the clusterfuck that happens if I modify the document and rename it with "rev.X" and another collaborator does the same.  It sucks...but even I've been known to do this.
3. Copy the document to a physical medium and pass it around.  This includes CDs, USB drives, external drives, etc.  I do this quite often when I travel and I know I will need to prepare a document.  But it sucks.
4. Use a corporate SharePoint site to share your document.  This is a great solution...if your company has a SharePoint site.  What if you're not a full Microsoft shop?  What if you work for a small company?  It also means you'll probably need VPN access, which is generally annoying.  For the record, I've been using Office personally and professionally for more than 10 years now and I've never shared a document using this method.
5. Use Office Live!  This is a relatively new offering from Microsoft who finally realized "Hey, maybe the rest of the non-corporate world would also like to share documents in a non-shitty way!" However, what sucks about this is that you still need to have the Office client...we'll touch on this point in a bit.
6. Use some sort of remote file share (FTP location, network file share, etc.).  This has various perils as well in addition to the inconvenience of having to have a VPN connection.

None of these options are really appealing, but until recently, there really wasn't a choice.  Regardless of what desktop processor you use, you're pretty much constrained to the same set of options (you can replace SharePoint with whatever web platform your client integrates with).

This sucks, for the reasons listed above, but it also sucks because it means that you have to lug around your laptop everywhere you go to work on documents.  It's the reason why you see business people scrunched up in coach, contorting their bodies and praying that the person in front doesn't put their seat back so they can fold out their laptop.  The desktop document processor client makes us all slaves.

But the future is coming.  For personal use, I don't think I'll ever author another Word document in Office ever again.  Both Google Docs and Zoho offer what I need so far as basic document processing goes and I have the added convenience of being able to easily share documents with others.  There's also the absolute coolness of being able to edit the same document in a live session with your collaborators.  This alone is not enough to change how we work with documents.  The iPhone and the impending release of Android (along with the next generatin of smart phones) will leave the Office stack in the dust.

As we're currently mulling a full transition to VS2008 and .NET 3.5, I've been investigating VSTO3 and ClickOnce once again.  My initial encounters with VSTO and ClickOnce were lacking.  With regards to VSTO, I didn't find anything that I could do with it that I couldn't do without it.  Indeed, it's more of an extension of the extensibility model which provides some under the cover plumbing than anything else.

The decision to attach ourselves to VSTO3 and ClickOnce is no light matter.  Luckily, Cindy Meister (Office MVP) and Mary Lee (Microsoft) were kind enough to weigh in on the matter over at the MSDN forums.

I think all Office developers should head over and take a look as it contains a wealth of information (and clarifies some common misunderstandings) with regards to VSTO and ClickOnce.

Microsoft has a very powerful set of group policy administrative templates which allow administrators to set configuration options for Office globally for all users in the domain.  This makes many development scenarios much easier since it allows you to easily ensure consistency in terms of Office configuration instead of writing custom code to do it in your add-in.

You can download the templates from MSDN.

You can find more details about installing and using the templates here.

And in case you were curious, here's a screen cap:

This is a must explore set of tools when working with Office applications.