Welcome to the Visual Studio SharePoint Tools Blog!

Before we get into any technical details, I just wanted to give you the background on how we came up with the idea of having this team blog, what this blog is about, as well as who will be contributing to the blog.

Some of you may have read Peter Jausovec's VSTO blog. One day, while I was brainstorming with Peter on what we could do to get more involved in helping our customers. The goal was to be helpful to our customers but also something fun to do away from our day to day jobs - this doesn't mean our jobs are not fun. :)

We had so many different options, but after weighing on the pros and cons of each, we locked onto the idea of creating a team blog focused on SharePoint Workflows and some of the Office client features. With this team blog, each team member has the opportunity to share his or her insightful knowledge from years of experiences by building the product. We also hope through this blog, we will learn from our customers.

About us? Well, we are a group of Software Design Engineers in Test. The majority of contributors to this blog have been working on VSTO related product or features for quite a few years. From time to time, we will also invite our Program Managers and Developers to be guest contributors. (They may have a few good thoughts to share too!) We currently plan to make 2 to 3 posts on a monthly basis; topics will be mainly on the released products or features. If there is anything specific you want to see us blogging, we would love to hear your feedback.

The types of content you will probably see here include but not limited to:

  • How to – tips & tricks, articles on development, deploying Workflows
  • Code snippets or power tools
  • Links to interesting stuff
  • Personal experience while building or using the product.
  • From time to time, we might post videos that document how we work as testers, or PMs, or developers.

We plan to make this a fun team activity. There are many incredible creative people on the team. The odds of seeing completely unexpected posts here is pretty high. Check back often! You never know what you may discover! You can subscribe to email alerts or use your favorite blog reader to follow our posts. Please feel free to contact us or post comments too. We love hearing and seeing the creativity of customers as well!

Jing Lou & Brent Williams

On behalf of the Visual Studio Business Applications SharePoint Tools QA team