Beginning InfoPath™ 2003

Chapter 11. Working with Code in Your InfoPath Form

You have been able to create quite a few InfoPath forms throughout the book that have been very useful with a stitch of code. However, as with other development products, the more you use InfoPath, the more extensive your needs are likely to become. As you start to look at working with other products such as BizTalk and adding functionality such as e-mailing users from forms, the need for more power than you get just by using the InfoPath editor and main form templates becomes more apparent.

Microsoft InfoPath originally gave you the ability to automate using your choice of VBscript or JScript and editing with the Microsoft Script Editor. With the Microsoft Office Service Pack 2 the ability to utilize managed code such as C# or Visual Basic .NET has been added. In either environment, an object model and events have been provided to let you accomplish just about anything you need to do.

The next few chapters go into greater detail about what technologies you can use to develop code, including giving some real-world examples. Because of the choices you have, this chapter gives an overview of what capabilities are being developed in code. In this chapter you will:

• Look at the two different development environments.

• Get started working in each environment.

• Learn about creating code with .NET.

• Work with the InfoPath event model.