Office Web Services Toolkit 2

An updated version of the Office Web Services Toolkit makes it easier for developers to incorporate XML-formatted data in custom solutions built on Office applications and may indicate how the company plans to incorporate Web services capabilities into the next version of Office (Office 11).

Improved XML Capabilities

The Office Web Services Toolkit allows applications that use Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), the built-in development environment used for building custom applications on top of Office, to exchange data with Web services. (For more information on the Office Web Services Toolkit, see “Tools Back Office as .NET Client” on page 17 of the Mar. 2002 Update.)

The new release of the toolkit provides better support for Web services that use complex data types (which are composed of other, simpler, data, such as a database record that is composed of fields such as “first name,” “last name,” “gender,” and “age”) by eliminating the custom XML parsing code that developers were forced to write in VBA.