Sorry I've gone dark for so long.  Something about features you've been working on that makes it hard to talk about because you're so excited you can't hold it in - and you realize you have to say nothing. 

 We announced today the API for OpenXML!  For those of you who have kept asking and asking about how to manipulate the OpenXML file on the server (or anywhere) without having to launch the Office client - this is part of what you've been asking for! 

What's my involvement here?  Kevin Boske and I prototyped, spec'ed and pushed for the API to exist.  We continue to be involved as reviewers of the API and are really excited to see a team take on something we'd been dreaming about for a long time.  And it has been a long time coming, and we hope our fans of Office programmability are pleased with the progress.  Pushing for this work has been little hard to do as a developer on Access, which has no real investment in the document format at this point, but the win for the developer is too big a deal to miss.

This API will let you take the Office document and programmatically modify a document without the Microsoft Office System installed!  It's still pretty steep to do everything you'd want to do on the server, but this is a first step to making some dreams possible.

The problem this API specifically tries to solve is the problem of finding parts in the file format without reading hills of documents.  The XSD's posted on the ECMA site go a long way to help program the XML inside the parts, but it's a bit more of a challenge to just get access to the parts and just work with the document. 

How much of our code, our foundation work is just in the plumbing today?  If you remember the code snippets we've shipped, there were a lot of strings for relationship types, content types, and the like.  This drop begins to abstract away things like that - allows us (as developers) to focus more on the task of writing our solutions - not on the file format's intricacies. 

This API does not get away from parts and XML. 

I'll blog more on this later, but I just wanted to give a shout out to the guys who worked so hard on this!