Book structure
"Office 365: the best recipes for developers" is a book aimed at coders. It explains how to work programmatically with Microsoft Office 365.
Office 365 is the collaboration and information sharing platform of Microsoft. It offers a few servers (Exchange, SharePoint), editing and authoring tools (Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio), and a myriad of other applications to help businesses in creating, managing and organizing information.
Whom is this book for?
This is a book made by and targeted to developers. We assume the readers do know how the Office applications work: You will not find functional descriptions or instructions for use. The book is also for developers that know the programming tools and technologies used by Microsoft and Office 365: Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, CSharp, PowerShell, JavaScript, etc.
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To develop with Office, if you do not have a license, you can join the Office Developer Program to get one and do the necessary development with the Office 365 suite of programs:
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev-program.
The subscription is valid for 90 days and can be renewed for another 90 days for as long as you are using it for development activity.
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Books by subscription
This is one in the series of books published by Güitaca under the mantra "Books by Subscription". Because modern technologies, and specially cloud software, evolve in a very fast tempo, the only way to maintain our readers actualized is publishing books that progress at the same speed as the technology.
You can buy the book in three ways:
-Book plus subscription for 12 updates. You will get the latest book version, access to the monthly updates, access to the repositories with the source code, and support from the author.
-Book only. You will get the first version of the book. You will miss the updates, will have no access to the source code repositories nor any kind of support. This is the case if you buy the book from Amazon or any other place and not directly from Güitaca (see the following section if this is your case).
-Subscription only. If you bought the book only and want to update it to the latest version, or if your subscription has expired and you want to renew it.
If you have a subscription, every four to six weeks you will receive an update that includes:
-Changes, modifications, and additions made by Microsoft to the technologies explained in the book.
-New content. We are aware that the book, probably, will never comprise every aspect of Office 365. Also, we do not have the arrogance to say that the author knows everything about Office. But we can ensure that we are aiming to make the content as complete as we can.
-Additionally, you get support from the author. If you have any question about the book or the published code, just let us know (info@guitaca.com) and we will try to help you as soon as possible (if we can, of course).
After 12 updates, we will produce a new edition, consolidating the last updates, adding new content if necessary, and initializing a new cycle. If you bought the book with subscription, you do not need to pay for it again: Your book registration will comprise the new edition as well if the subscription is valid.
If you bought the book from Amazon or another provider
If you bought your book from Amazon or any other provider, you will only get the book, will have no updates subscription, no access to the source code and no support from the author.
You can update your book getting the complete experience by going to our site https://guitaca.com, and buying the Subscription only offering. You only need to send us the receipt you got from Amazon or other provider, and you will get the full and most recent book version, access to the following 12 updates, access to the source code repositories, and support from the author.
Your book registration
The book updates are available from our download site https://guitaca.com/Home/Login. When you buy the book from our site (or the Subscription deal if you bought your book from a provider other than Güitaca), you receive a License Key sent to you with the receipt or after our validation. With your email address and this license code, you can log in to the downloads site. If you lose the code, you can ask for a new one from the site (a confirmation email will be sent to your email address, and you need to validate it).
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Data privacy statement:We only ask for an email address for registration of your book's copy and make the downloads available for you. We DON'T use it for any commercial purpose, and we will never monetize it in any way. You will only receive a few emails from us: -When you buy the book (or subscription) from our site, you receive one email with the acknowledgement of receipt and your License Key code. -If you lose your password and request a new one, we will send one validation email first and then another one, after validation, with the new License Key to the registered address. -By default, we will send you one email when a new update is ready for download. You can void it at any moment from the download site self (and you can change it again if you wish). -If your subscription is coming to an end, we will send you one email with instructions on how to renew it.
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About the source code
All the source code was developed using Visual Studio Enterprise and, in some cases, Visual Studio Code. We always use the last version of Visual Studio, with the latest patches installed. Each fragment of code (recipe) was tested to ensure the code is functioning correctly. Whenever possible, we also made unit-test classes (not available for download), so that we can automatically test the code if Microsoft changes something in the APIs.
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Although Visual Studio Enterprise was used for the code, you can also use Visual Studio Community, which can be downloaded for free from the Microsoft site:
https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/
Visual Studio Code is an Open Source and free code editor that can be downloaded from the same site and is used for some parts of the book as well.
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The code is simplified as much as possible to minimize its size: It does not include, for example, exception routines, and it should not be used directly for production applications.
All the source code can be downloaded from our source code repositories. To locate the solution used, each source fragment in the book has a header in the following form (if you bought the book only offered from Amazon or other provider, your copy will not have the information about the repo and code location):
Where:
1 is the chapter number and sequential number of the recipe in the chapter. If you need to send us a comment about any code fragment in the book, please refer to this number.
2 is the solution code identifier. This is the name of the solution that you will find in the repository.
3 is the file name where the recipe can be found in the solution.
4 is the additional information about the routines, NuGets, dlls, etc., required to make the recipe work.
