I went to one of Microsoft’s seminars yesterday to learn about their new user-interface directions, and I also learned about VSTO, which could be very useful in iMIS. Starting with .NET 2005, it is much easier to program office documents. One example is the new ServerDocument class, which allows efficient creation (and I think reading as well) of office documents on a server. It is much more efficient because it does not use the office programs themselves, which are designed for a single user. For example, you can create a Word or Excel document on a server without using Word or Excel. Also, it is much easier to integrate programming into office documents, which can now be done in C# using the standard .NET Framework. A big advance is that the code is now stored separately from the document, allowing the code to be updated for existing documents.