How to Use This Book

Preface

The goal of this book is to provide a developer s reference for application development for Microsoft InfoPath 2003, along with the underlying standards and various associated technologies that help to complete an InfoPath-based solution. This book shows how these different technologies work together and describes some of the practical patterns and practices that can be used to develop applications.

How to Use This Book

This book builds on itself as you move forward. If you have a good understanding of Office 2003, .NET Framework, and InfoPath, you may want to skip Chapters 1 and 2; you can refer back to these introductory chapters as needed.

Many of the topics covered in the text are fairly self-contained so that if you are looking for a quick reference on a specific topic, you should be able to find it quickly. Each chapter of the book examines a specific topic area in order to create an easy-to-find cross-reference of specific samples or how-to information.

This book is designed for the application developer and not the end user. If you are looking for specific end-user features, then this is not the text for you. If you re looking for information on end- user features, I recommend that you take a look at Special Edition Using Microsoft Office 2003 by Ed Bott. If you are a hard- core enterprise developer who is interested in creating distributed applications that use InfoPath, you are reading the right book.

What You Need to Use This Book

This book requires that you have a PC running Windows Server 2003 or Windows XP Professional running at least Microsoft InfoPath 2003. Many of the samples require the use of Microsoft s Internet Information Server (IIS) for the Web-enabled samples. Additionally, you will need Visual Studio.NET 2003 or the .NET Framework 1.1 to compile and run many of the samples. If you want to take advantage of all the samples mentioned, you will also need to have available the Microsoft Office System 2003 and all the associated products included.

Assumed Knowledge

This book assumes that you have experience developing applications within a distributed environment and that you understand Web-based programming. The examples used in the book are designed to illustrate the various concepts explained throughout, so that you can focus on the various concepts that we will cover. However, the assumption is that you understand basic programming and enterprise architecture concepts.

Chapter 1: Anatomy of the Microsoft Office System 2003

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Introduction

It s been almost four years since Microsoft announced the .NET strategy. This strategy was centered on a new and innovative platform that would change the way applications and systems were designed and developed. At the announcement, one of the most interesting pieces of the .NET strategy was an almost total reliance on a set of emerging standards. At the time, these standards were becoming increasingly important based on the growing integration needs and platform interoperability issues that businesses were facing . Today, these Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based standards are enterprise proven and the .NET platform is a reality. Both .NET and XML have had a substantial impact on the way applications are designed and implemented. The addition of the Microsoft Office System 2003 changes the landscape and architecture even more.

This chapter provides a basic overview of the .NET Framework, Microsoft Office 2003, and the various technologies used throughout this book. This is an important starting point as we look more deeply at the newest product in the Office family, Microsoft InfoPath 2003. Even if you are an experienced developer, this chapter provides the baseline architectural overview used throughout the rest of the book. It is really important to review the concepts here so that you really understand the rest of the book and can explore the full potential of InfoPath 2003.