Hello Seattle, TechReady3 and Excel Services

This week I am attending the Microsoft TechReady3 convention. Is it an internal convention like PDC or TechEd. We arrived in Seattle yesterday an the first thing that we met when we got out of the plane was a dazzeling heat of about 34 degrees celsius. Good thing I brought my shorts :o).

Due to the 9 hour time difference, I woke up wide awake at 4 a.m. and what else where there to do than watching a couple of webcasts until the alarm went off at seven.

One of them was about Excel Services in the Office Server 2007 suite, and this is an exiting new product that allows you to present Excel sheets, single Pivot tables or Graphs on at webpage. Also it allows you to have business logic and calculations done by the Business Analysist and have this logic built in to Windows and Web applications through Web Services. This way, the developer can focus on the application functionality and not having to "translate" Excel logic into C# code...

One thing you do have to have in mind when looking at the new features is, that it requires Excel 2007 and you have to save it in the new .xlsx format. Furthermore it does not support VBA and Macros as it is all handled though managed code.

I will be back during the week with more updates from all the interesting sessions I will be attending.