Office 2003 and Web Services - questions

[Luther Miller]

1. Does Office 2003 ship with built-in support for Web Services, or must the
Office XP Web Services Toolkit be installed? Is ANY additional client
install necessary for an Office 2003 application, e.g., Excel 2003, to call
a web service?

2. Is there a way to handle a DataSet returned from a Web Service in the VBA
in Office 2003 applications, specifically Excel 2003? If not, how is it
recommended to return a set of data from a web service in ASP.NET to an
Excel application? Are there any examples?

3. Does Office 2003 force an install of the .NET Framework, such that .NET
for Office applications do not require any client installs?

 

[Joe_MSFT]

1. There is no built-in support for generic Web services in the Office 2003
editions. There will be a Web Services Toolkit available for Office 2003
around the time the product is available on the street. Word and Excel have
mechanisms (INSERTTEXT, Web queries) to use simple Web services which are
purely call-able via a URL.

2. It's best to do it from .NET using the PIAs directly or using Visual
Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System (beta downloadable from MSDN:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...7c-4ab5-40d2-b4d9-5817ab0bc1e5&DisplayLang=en).
You can either pull the data out and place manually place in cells or use an
XML mapping. I've forwarded a draft paper on this topic we're creating that
should hit MSDN within a month.

3. In general the Office 2003 editions do not install the Framework. The
only exception is IF the Business Contact Manager is installed (an option in
the small business edition and the professional edition) as that's the only
component built with managed code.

 

[Luther Miller]

Thanks for forwarding the paper - I haven't read it in detail yet, but
it reminded of two knowledge base articles on similar subjects.

I find it both surprising and dissapointing that Office 2003 does not
include native support for web services, especially after the web
services hype during the launch of VS.NET 2002 and at VSLive!. At
least it appears that MSSOAP is installed with Office, so it appears
to be possible to build web services elsewhere and use them from
Office 2003 without an additional client install.

The second dissapointment is that .NET is not installed when Office
2003 is installed. If we were to build Excel applications with the
Office tools for VS.NET, for example, I assume they would not run on
an Office client unless the .NET framework was installed.

Of course, in many situations, we can get clients to install
additional software on their workstations, but there are many cases
where this is not possible or practical. In these cases, we are
limited to the least common denominater of the install base. This is
the primary reason I would like to see these installed with Office
2003. With previous versions of Excel, I have been using MSXML and
serialized ADO Recordsets to transfer data between ASP.NET and Office
(I am currently working on an article about this). Unfortunately, it
looks like I may need to do this for Office 2003 as well.

Cheers,
Luther