Sheng Jiang 蒋晟

I know, it is long overdue. Microsoft discontinued it a decade ago. And Office is not meant to be embedded. I even advised people to not use it in new development almost a decade ago. Then why I keep using it for so long?

Because customers don’t want changes. I work in the medical field, where some of the clients still use telnet to interface with their medical software that are probably older than I am. Once you get people hooked to a UI it is hard to change that. The fact that Microsoft discontinues dsoframer means nothing to them – once I use it, I own it. It is like Microsoft having to release an Office update for the old equation editor made by MathType 16 years ago. So I have been doing patchwork as much as I can to keep dsoframer alive.

It might be a blessing in disguise that Office 2016 finally broke dsoframer on Windows 10 in a way that I can’t fix. The control just keep calculates the scrolling sizes wrong. I have to work on a solution for customers who can accept a side-by-side UI instead of embedding Office. Shortly after I published the update Microsoft dropped the bomb that the MSI edition of Office is being discontinued, I have to say that I am lucky to have some doctors finally start accepting the side by side UI. Maybe the rest will also get use to it now there’s no alternative.

Some issues I encountered over the years

The click-to-run edition of Office dropped the registry entries required by dsoframer to function .

.Net Programmability support is not a default install option of Office

Adobe Acrobat Reader shipped with dsoframer too, and uninstall either the reader or my app breaks the remaining one. Note to self: GuidGen on samples.

Does not open document if Office is running

Various drawing issues.

I supported embedding Word longer than the Outlook team, I am really not proud of that.