Introductions

Well, I'm now a certified MSDN blogger. I've been meaning to do this for a long time, but just haven't gotten around to it.

First of all, let me give a little information about myself. I'm a developer at Microsoft working on the next version of Excel. Let me just tell you that it will be sweet and probably the biggest release of Office since Office 95. There are some amazing features that will really knock your socks off. This, of course, is my personal opinion and not "official" Microsoft PR (just wanted to get that legal part out of the way), although I'm sure that Microsoft would certainly agree with me [:D].

When I manage to get a free minute (which is hard with two kids under the age of 5 and a third on the way), I've spent the last year and a half working on Votive, which is the Visual Studio 2003 package for WiX. In that time I've gotten to know pretty well the VSIP 2003 SDK and all of the seemingly endless interfaces that one must implement to even plug into Visual Studio. I thought it might be nice to share some of what I've learned in a series of blogs in case anybody else out there is planning on writing custom Visual Studio packages.

Also, I'd like to lay out the roadmap of where I see Votive going and what kinds of things people can help out with if they're interested in contributing to the project. So, there's more to come in the next few weeks. Hopefully it will be useful. If so, let me know so I'm enthused about continuing to write these blogs. If not, I guess that's good to know, too. [;)]

Anyway, check back later for more info. I think the Votive roadmap will be next.