Hey Sturart,
During this release of office each product team had primary objectives they
were focusing on, for word, excel, and power point one of these objectives
was to address the growing number of tool bars in the application. For the
InfoPath team the focus was creating forms that could be hosted in a number
of environment e,g. via the web browser, outlook and winforms.
You'll find that if you look through some of the other office apps they too
are also missing the pretty makeover e.g. Outlook.
As for the addition of features for devs, this has been addressed more under
the covers than in the UI as a start the InfoPath object model has been
revamped and upgraded to use System.XML for all xml modifications rather
than MSXML. They have also added the ability to create template parts so the
ability to break your form development down into small chunks and once each
part is complete you can dump them onto a master form. These parts can allso
be updated and each of the changes will then flow through and update
existing forms.
All in all there have been some pretty major changes to IP on a whole, but
on a quick look a lot of these will not be apparent. On my first look I had
the same throught as you that this wasn't much of an upgrade but when you
start to dig down into it you find there are some cool new things to
explore. My suggestion would be to setup a server with Microsoft Offce
SharePoint Server and start playing witht the web enabled features. Once you
get bored of that try plugging some workflow in then you should start to get
excited about it
)
Enjoy
