As you probably know, TechEd US has just passed. I didn’t get to go (like always), but I did get to make my mark on the conference. I got to build one of the apps that Microsoft demoed on stage. I have actually built a bunch of demo apps for Microsoft and their conferences the last year. At some point, I will actually try to find them at some point a post some videos of them here. But they involve a CRM demo with a phone company, a SharePoint demo with a racing team and some other bits and pieces. Anyhow…this year my demo was a Word add-in, and my personal opinion about this project, before it got started, was that it sucked. I I’m not very fond of building Word add-ins as you might have guessed.
But guess what, I was wrong. Once again, it was a Chris Auld special as we call them at Intergen. That means a crazy project with cool technology and short deadline. Most of my projects the last year have been CA specials. I love them cause they are a lot of fun. They are however quite demanding due to the lack of time and continuously moving target. And considering that this demo was a Chris Auld special, it turned into a funky project.
I must mention that I wasn’t alone on this project. I did get help from some of my fellow Intergenites for some of the parts I don’t know well enough. Sophie Khun rocked up some sweet CRM action for me (read she set up CRM and all the CRM data we used). And Chakkaradeep Chandran got the PowerPivot and SharePoint parts set up. So a big thanks to those guys.
Before it was over, it involved VSTO, CRM, SharePoint, WinForms, WPF, Silverlight, WCF, Bing Maps, Twitter and LinkedIn. As you can see, it is quite a mash-up of technologies.
And if you don’t trust me that the video above is real, you can see it at http://www.msteched.com/2010/NorthAmerica/FDN-3 as well. Scrub about 36 minutes into the video to see my demo (or at least the demo I built).
I won’t write too much about the application as such as the video shows it off pretty well. But I did want to brag a little and show it off.