Excel 2003 Programming: A Developer's Notebook

How the Pieces Fit

The preceding analogy isn’t as silly as it looks. To break it down a bit, consider the pieces that make up the new Excel features:

Note

Things that make life easier for some often make things more complicated for someone else (in this case, us). Understanding XML and its related standards is a major undertaking. Fortunately, Office often lets you take a high-level view.

• Workspaces and lists are documents and document fragments that you create in Excel and share through SharePoint services.

• Lists exist as XML data which is imported or exported through Excel.

• These pieces all interoperate by means of web services.

• Finally, InfoPath is the form engine that collects data and stores it as XML.

Figure 1-2 illustrates how these pieces fit together. The XML flowing between each piece is called a data stream . Figure 1-1 is not really off the mark.

Figure 1-2. XML-based features cooperate behind the scenes

Underlying this interaction are two pieces that I don’t know how to fit into Figure 1-2 legibly:

Note

If you explore a SharePoint server, you won’t find any list, workspace, or even XML “files” - it’s all stored in SQL! In fact, that’s the way the next generation of Windows works; Longhorn is backed by SQL.

• You can program Excel and these other components using Visual Basic .NET. You can still use VBA in Excel, but VB.NET provides a better programming platform for working with XML, web services, and InfoPath.

• Security controls access throughout the system. Office 2003 uses established techniques, such as digital signatures, and introduces permissions through Information Rights Management (IRM).