Instant Love

Instant Love

On the surface, InfoPath is "just" a forms editor that allows you to build editable Forms for XML Schema, Web Services and Databases very quickly. From a technology perspective that's very cool in itself, but the way InfoPath hides all of that behind its UI will simply make you say "Well, yes, that's how it should be". It's really a no-nonsense data-capture and data-presentation centric variation of what could have been yet another feature of FrontPage that few people would have ever noticed, just because it's UI is so simple. It's all Office.

The actual power of InfoPath lures in the details:

• When you design a form based on an XML Schema, and fill out that form later, the document that you'll save will be a pure XML document instance of the exact underlying schema, without any other goo. InfoPath will only associate the instance with itself by injecting a processing instruction.
• InfoPath understands XML Schema type restrictions, validates them and gives you red frames on fields that are wrong. It spell-checks and gives you red squiggles for misspelled words. It gives you repeating edit regions for arrays of complex types. It gives you date pickers for dates. It gives you combo-boxes for enums.
• When you "export" a form template (whose native storage format is, inexplicably, binary), you will find an XSLT innocently hanging out in your output directory. That stylesheet is capable of rendering an XML instance of the underlying schema to a proper DHTML page that is visually (and functionally) equivalent to the form you've designed.
• You can submit a filled out form to a file or to a web service; however, most importantly, you can submit to a Windows Scripting Host script (JScript/VBScript). Which means that you could smuggle (for instance) a COM/Interopped managed pipeline underneath it (think WSE) that will wrap the payload into an envelope and add all the current and essential web services stuff to it. Or you could submit to a disconnected message queue on a client and have a server do the processing for forwarding your data into a service-oriented bus. Or you could drop stuff into BizTalk.

Here's stuff that I wish that InfoPath was that it isn't:

• I want (very very much!) and you all want InfoPath to be a reusable component. By all I can see now, it isn't an ActiveDocument server or an ActiveX control or has a reusable Windows Forms component.
• I want InfoPath to be a dev tool. I want to use it with C# and VB.NET and NetCOBOL and Eiffel -- not just with Script.
• I don't want InfoPath to be part of Office only. I want and InfoPath "filler" app. InfoPath deserves to be an integral part of Visual Studio!

On Tuesday, I hijacked the Q&A portion of one of my talks in Helsinki/Finland to throw in a demo of InfoPath. I have never demoed any feature of Office (except PowerPoint freezing up on me). People stared at the thing in disbelief when I highlighted the potential.

Microsoft, you have a winner there: Bring it back home to where it belongs - make it a reusable thing, make it a redistributable thing, let us make it the center of our smart client apps -- make it a Dev Tool. Please.