"Yes, it's a hack, but it's a hack based on the latest Microsoft technology." She said, with a straight face.
Boy is InfoPath cool. And yes, it's only around as an adjunct to SharePoint. But this in no way diminishes it's coolness! One thing you definitely have to try is the new Service Pack they have out, which allows you to post and retrieve data from web services. Too confusing? Spend the day walking through this great tutorial they have, and all will become clear. I love this kinda stuff, it's right up my alley. I don't much care about bit shifting or traditional programming things, but if it solves a business case and I can maintain the code, this makes me very happy.
Which, of course, is a slippery slope right into hacking. The other thing I did today was pop open the guts of a powerpoint file when you've done a "Save As" to html. What I want to do is dynamically change the color of certain boxes in the display, based on a list. If an item on the list is in the display, I'd like the fill color to change to yellow, for example. Once I get my main plumbing bolted in, this shouldn't be too hard. The title.htm file that's created contains a shape ID as well as the text (so you can verify if that's the ID you want, based on your list). Then, once you have your ID, move on over to title.xml and find that ID. Change the fillcolor = "yellow" and you're done. Oh, I'll also have to handle dynamic display and possibly file management, plus concurrent users. Hmmm. Anyway, I expected this to be harder.
Now I just need plumbing in order to try this stuff out.