I spent a lot of time feeling stupid when I first dove into the new Office (web) add-ins several years ago during the “Agave” private MVP beta. They were then launched under the more appropriate moniker of “Apps for Office”. They’ve since been renamed as “Office add-ins”. Not to be confused with the desktop kind called, um, “Office add-ins” (AKA COM add-ins). Anyway, I learned what I could to prepare for some sessions that I presented on about this new platform at various conferences (Prairie Developer Conference, Winnipeg Code Camp and DevConnections Las Vegas 2013 I believe).
But it wasn’t enough. You have to go DEEP and build an actual working application or solve a deep problem in order to truly start mastering a new tech. It helps if you get paid to learn even more, such as when I built an Outlook web add-in for KnowBe4 (Phish Alert, and a COM add-in version as well). The new knowledge I gained from that project gave me ideas to start developing a new product to sell on the Office Store – MessageFiler. Follow the link to get a sneak peak and join the beta – it’ll also give you a chance to see my redesigned web site.
However, MessageFiler was taking a looong time to develop, as I was getting burned by some limitations of the platform and getting bogged down by my rusty and incomplete knowledge of JavaScript and jQuery. Yet I dug deep and dug hard and consumed and learned and banged my head against the desk – and came away with tons of developer goodness.
Check out what I mean with my new blog post in the MVP Award Program Blog on MSDN:
Unifying Your Web Dev Skills for Office Add-ins
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/mvpawardprogram/2016/01/26/unifying-your-web-dev-skills-for-office-add-ins
UPDATE, 2016-02-03: My article has now also been posted on the Canadian Developer Connection blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/cdndevs/archive/2016/02/03/unifying-your-web-dev-skills-for-office-add-ins.aspx
I will have another companion blog post here soon with even more tips and tricks and deeper stuff that didn’t make it into the article. Until then – cheers!
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