Andy Simonds Blog

Best places to get XPS Info

Andy Simonds — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 22:04:00 GMT

Since I moved over to the Office team this blog (primarily focused on XPS) is not very active. If you are looking for the latest info on XPS, here are some helpful links: XPS implementation information at http://www.microsoft.com/xps XPS in Vista...(read more)

We are Done!!!

Andy Simonds — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 22:25:00 GMT

Wooohooooo!!!! Windows Vista RTM'd today: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/default.mspx

Almost 5 years of my life working on this project and we are done. I can't wait to see everyone using it. That is the reward for working so hard on something like this - knowing that people in all corners of the world will be using the software we built.

- Andy

.NET Framework 3.0 is Released

Andy Simonds — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 20:18:00 GMT

Sort of Chapter 1 of a 3-part release of the innovation we have been working on for the last 4 or so years.

Chapter 1 - .NET 3.0. Contains all of the XPS and OPC document APIs, XPS Viewer and XPS print driver and runs on Windows XP (built into Windows Vista). It is out today and you can download it here.

Chapter 2 - Release of Office 2007 that contains their new file format based on OPC packaging and XPS 'Save-As' support. Office 2007 RTM'd last week, with release coming at the end of the month.

Chapter 3 - Release of Windows Vista. Part A - Business release before end of year, Part B - Consumer release in January. Contains of course all of our XPS/OPC, Printing, Scanning, Color and Fax innovations we have made over the last several years. Read the product guide for details on the individual features.

Seen and Noted

Andy Simonds — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 21:24:00 GMT

A few things to note:

A very cool white-board demo you have to see. Posted on Nils van Boxsel's blog (who has a lot of interesting things up on his blog).
I noticed that Adobe has announced a new project called 'Mars'. It seems to be essentially a PDF replacement using XML, SVG and ZIP: "Mars documents can be created by using XML components representing pages and the overall document structure and then combining them in a Zip package using off-the-shelf XML and ZIP tools". Sound familiar? Normally I wouldn't comment on such things, but given the never ending questions we get about XPS being a 'me too' document format, and how much we have educated the industry about the benefits of a document format 'really' being built using open standards like XML and ZIP - it is nice to see such a pure validation of our approach. All of us in Bldg 2 are deeply flattered.
We announced a few weeks back about XPS going to a standards body. There were some articles in the last week or so quoting a Microsoft executive that said we were not doing that. That was not accurate - he was ill-informed. We are still planning on taking XPS to a standards body.
Retail Packaging for Windows Vista and Office 2007 has been revealed. Check it out at the Windows Vista Blog. Looks very cool.

- Andy

Kofax Announces XPS Support

Andy Simonds — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 18:44:00 GMT

Kofax recently sent out a press release regarding support for XPS in their toolkit for the document capture industry. Kofax technology is utilized by a majority of the document scanning vendors in the industry and their support for XPS is an important step for broader XPS adoption.

- Andy

XPS v1 is on-line

Andy Simonds — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 18:01:00 GMT

The final v1.0 of the XPS spec is available for download. Get it here.

- Andy

XML Paper Specification v1.0 RTMs!!!!!!!!

Andy Simonds — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 23:34:00 GMT

At 11:30 AM PST - the final version of the XML Paper Specification (v1.0) RTM'd. This is a great day and represents an incredible amount of hard work, blood-shed, tears, slaying dragons (and lawyers) by the team to get to this point. We started on this years ago, and at times I thought this day would never come. I'll try and not be too dramatic, but this really is a milestone for Microsoft and the industry. I can only image what the years ahead will mean to this technology, how many ways it will be used, how many systems it will be integrated into.

There are too many people to name that contribued to the spec - maybe I will post an exhaustive list later. But - I have to at least not only give thanks to the team that designed it, but also to so many partners of ours that helped review every version of the spec, did prototype implementations, filed bugs, found every little inconsistency they could find and helped drive the spec to the quality it has today. You know who you are and we thank you.

We had a mini-celebration outside my office this morning. We poured Champagne and all of us signed the first printed copy of v1.0. When I say RTM (release to manufacturing) that really is only a few days for a spec. It will be posted very soon on the web and I will blog when that happens. Next step - is to RTM the code. That will be a slightly bigger party I think.

Not everyone could attend our little gathering, but a quick pic of the team is below.

The signed spec - as soon as the missing people can sign it, I think it will make a nice poster. I'll post a hi-res version of it when we finish the signatures and those of you outside MS can grab it. Maybe, we should sign a bunch of hard-copies and do a signing at Barnes and Noble??? (maybe a bit much).

- Andy

New Windows Vista PC

Andy Simonds — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 05:30:00 GMT

I’ve finally purchased my ‘Vista’ PC for my home. My new PC was custom built from parts from Fry’s with the help (or should I say completely assembled why I just watched) by Britt from the D2 team (thanks Britt). It’s a smokin’ machine, pretty blue LED lights in front, a bunch of huge drives, 2GB of RAM, ATI 1600 vid card w/512MB of RAM and an AMD 64 bit processor. It’s a great machine and should last me a long time. With Windows Vista and Office 2007 installed it is quite nice. I’m also playing around with Adobe Lightroom Beta 4 which is starting to look like a really good photo processing app for RAW shooters.

The improvements in Windows Vista are vast. With the latest builds I am encountering hardly any issues. It even auto-detected my networked HP 6127 (XP can’t do that!) and although there was no built in driver (boo!), I was easily able to install the XP driver from HPs website and I was on my way. We talk a lot about ‘integrated search’ but a cool place to see this at work (other than the Start menu which is a pretty obvious improvement) is in Control Panel. When you open Control Panel you are presented with a list of icons like ‘System and Maintenance’ and ‘Security’, etc. But, we all know there is a pant-load of settings and configuration options lurking below those 10 icons. If you switch to ‘Classic View’ you can see it gets pretty overwhelming quickly. But – forget classic view, just go up to the ubiquitous ‘Search’ box at the top and type what you are looking for – very quickly that big simple UI transforms itself into a list of all the things in control panel that may pertain to what you typed. Try things like ‘remote’ or ‘password’ or ‘desktop’ and you get a quick list of all things that can be tweeked that relate to what you typed.

But the real validation came from my son, who when he saw Windows Vista in its full-glass-glory for the first time, simply said “super-cool!”. There are a lot of great things in the product, but when people look at it and think “I’ve got to have that” – that is what will really cause Windows Vista to take off.

Andy

What's going on?

Andy Simonds — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 01:42:00 GMT

A few random updates. But 1st, I mentioned putting up a picture of the spec. Here it is in its' baby-blue splendor:

Will these internally printed copies be worth anything at some point? Something about it seems more valuable than the boring bits and bytes representation up on the web. Maybe if it is signed by the people who designed it? Would it get $4 on e-bay? Well, some people outside of bldg 2 now have copies. We had a plug-fest last week that was attended by 22 hardware and software vendors that are actively building XPS solutions and we gave them all a physical copy of the spec. It was amazing seeing the collaboration going on - people exchanging test files, working with each other, finding bugs. Not like some boring plugfest for a typical standard (like USB 2.0) - but a plugfest on something that is completely voluntary to implement - something brand new - something that will have impact on the participating companies business. We are so close. In fact, close enough that I finally booked my post-Vista vacation to the Big Island in December. Bugs are slowly going down, quality is great, we are going to ship.

If you want to seeem some cool, hidden-gems on what Vista can do, go visit Tim Sneath's blog. He's got a running list of cool Vista features, some I had no idea existed. Check it out.

- Andy

New DigSig Article

Andy Simonds — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 23:00:00 GMT

A new article on digital signatures is up on MSDN. Written by Andrey Shur (our all-knowing, all-seeing PM on packaging technology) it gives an overview of how the whole OPC Digital Signing Framework works. I know the Bears and Seahawks are playing this weekend, but you may want to spend that time reading this article instead.

- Andy

XPS .95 now available

Andy Simonds — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 02:18:00 GMT

Version .95 of the XPS spec is now available. Download it from the XPS download site. Also, go to the main XPS blog to get all the details on what is new and what is changed with this version. Specs were printed out in baby-blue this time. Last version was dark blue - so I can only conclude that we are moving towards the 1.0 version being white as the covers get lighter. Likely it is simply Jesse's random choice. I'll take a picture at some point to share.

We are basically done. We are there, it's all wrapped up. Years of work and we are about to ship, and the spec is essentially locked down. 1.0 will just be formatting, index type of things. When Vista ships - this will be quite the year to remember. It would only be better if the US won the Ryder Cup. I'm still trying to get over how bad that was.

-Andy

InfoTrends talk in Boston

Andy Simonds — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 07:13:00 GMT

Next week I am off to Boston to speak at the InfoTrends Office Document Solutions conference. Feel free to make fun of the bad picture of me on the website. The title of my talk is 'XPS Revealed'. I'm going to take an stab at really explaining some of the fundamental trends in the software industry, what customers have been looking for and how it lead us to make the investments in XPS and the overall document platform in Vista. Should be fun for everyone.

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Tim Sneath has a great list of quick-links to new downloads of Windows Vista/.NET RC1available. I stole it for your convenience:

Windows Vista RC1 (Customer Preview Program, MSDN and TechNet Subscribers)
.NET Framework 3.0 RC1
Windows SDK RC1
Visual Studio "Orcas" Extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 RC1 (also see readme for WPF designer)
Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for Windows Workflow Foundation
Expression Interactive Designer September CTP
Expression Graphics Designer September CTP

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Summer is over here. After the driest summer in history (everything is brown) and lots of fires still ranging in the mountains - the rain came today. It's all over - we are doomed to pay for the great summer with 6 months straight rain. So sad. Here is an interesting picture I took this weekend.

- Andy

Beta 2 of XPS Essentials Pack is out

Andy Simonds — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 01:04:00 GMT

Beta 2 of the XPS essentials pack is out. Read about the details and how to download at the XPS team blog. Here is the quick list of what is in the pack:

A stand-alone XPS Document Viewer
Microsoft XPS Document Writer to output files to the XPS Document format through the print command of any Windows application.
iPreview and iFilter interface implementations for XPS Documents
XPSDrv printer driver to enable printing to XPS devices.
Shell extensions for inspecting and changing XPS Document properties in Windows Explorer

- Andy

RC1 is out

Andy Simonds — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 00:49:00 GMT

RC1 of .NET 3.0 and Windows Vista has shipped. If you are a beta tester for Vista you already should have access to the released bits. Anyone can download .NET 3.0 from here. .NET 3.0 contains the latest bits of Windows Presentation Foundation and of course the platform APIs for XPS and the XPS viewer. Also - the XPS print driver is available in the package as well, so you essentially have everything you need in .NET 3.0 to create, program and view XPS documents.

You may have noticed that my blog is not as active as of late. We are in ship-mode, fixing bugs, putting out fires and starting a little bit of work on 'what's next' for the team. So not a lot of news for me to report on, but rest assured the team is working its' behind off to get this product shipped.

In the news, Software Imaging has announced an SDK for XPS print drivers. Read about it here.

-Andy

MXDW in July .NET 3.0 CTP

Andy Simonds — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 01:54:00 GMT

In the July CTP of .NET 3.0 (formerly WinFX) the XPS print driver (MXDW) is included in the package. This may have been missed by a lot of people because, frankly we kind of forgot to tell everyone. So, if you are using Windows XP and have been wondering how to get a hold of the latest XPS print driver - just download the July CTP. But DANGER - you have to go to this link directly.

There is a bug in setup on the main link on the .NET 3.0 site that causes the print driver to not be installed. We will hopefully get it fixed. In the meantime go to the link above.

- Andy

Updated Hardware Logo Requirements for XPS and WSD

Andy Simonds — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 00:57:00 GMT

We've announced some new requirements for hardware supporting XPS and WSD. Specifically we are giving 1 year additional time for vendors to implement XPS and WSD before requiring those technologies in order to receive a Windows Premium Logo.

Here is the specific text captured from our latest newsletter that went out a few days ago:

Microsoft is updating the Premium Logo Program requirements for Microsoft Windows Vista after carefully reviewing the product schedules and marketing drive. The new document that contains these changes is Version 3.03 of the Windows Logo Program Device Requirements for Windows Vista Client and Windows Server code named "Longhorn" will be available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/winlogo/hwrequirements.mspx on July 17.

The changes made in the Printing and Imaging Devices section of the requirements document are:

•	IMAGING-0004: Any network-connected device that supports Windows network-connected Web Services for Devices (WSD) must implement WSD properly for their device type This has been changed from a mandatory requirement for the Premium Logo to an "if implemented" requirement. On July 1, 2007, this will return to a mandatory requirement for the Premium Logo.
•	IMAGING-0010: Printer driver correctly implements XPSDrv printer driver architecture This has be changed from a mandatory requirement for the Premium Logo to an "if implemented" requirement. On July 1, 2007, this will return to a mandatory requirement for the Premium Logo.

All other printing and imaging requirements remain unchanged.

For scanners, one of the requirements to receive a Certified for Windows Vista logo is for the scanner to meet the criteria of DEVFUND-0019, Devices that support Windows color quality initiatives meet Delta E tolerances. See Version 3.03 of the Windows Logo Program Device Requirements for Windows Vista Client and Windows Server code named "Longhorn" for the most up-to-date Windows Logo requirements.

Windows Media Photo Update

Andy Simonds — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 01:36:00 GMT

There is new info posted on the web regarding Windows Media Photo licensing. Latest info on licensing and a sample agreement is now posted.

The main Windows Media Photo page is here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/wmphoto/default.aspx

The licensing page is here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/licensing/wmphoto.aspx

-Andy

New D2 Newsletter and WinHEC slides

Andy Simonds — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 18:11:00 GMT

A new D2 newsletter hit the stands today. If you are still not getting the newsletter please go subscribe. Lots of material in the newsletter. One of the topics is that we re-cover the changes we are making due to Adobe's threats. No new changes to report. What I posted before on the subject is what we are doing. Overall, the press and more importantly the customers who are posting their opinions on websites and blogs, are overwhelming stating their disappointment with the situation. Some nut jobs of course come out and predict deep conspiracy theories, but those seem to be pretty rare. In general, the simplest explanation is usually right. We are trying to provide functionality that are customers are asking for, Adobe is asking us not to do that. Nothing deeper at play than that.

Slides from our presentations at WinHEC went live this week. Links to slides on printing and color are here.

- Andy

Flickr Addiction

Andy Simonds — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 07:00:00 GMT

This year I have gotten more and more addicted to Flickr. Don't know how it happened. I've tried several photo sites including msn-spaces as a way to share photos, but Flickr seems to be the best. Photography is probably my #2 hobby behind golf (and when I golf - I take pictures, so it doesn't get much better than that)! With Flickr I can easily share photos with family/friends, and post those photos in different Flickr groups so I can get comments, feedback. After a while, more and more people start commenting on photos, selecting photos as their 'favorites' and the whole 'community' feel that flickr does a great job of, starts to suck you in. They also made it super easy to link photos to my blog - not that it is hard, but they just took the time to have the raw html associated with the photo so I could simply cut and paste it while I was creating a blog entry (it's the little things). It has a method to send a photo directly to a blog using Atom or other feed methods, but I failed to get it to work with this blog (any help here would be great).

I'd normally be partial to a MS solution for this type of thing, but we just don't have anything I like right now. Below are a few of my photos that have received a lot of 'views' on my flickr site - click on them to get to bigger versions.

-Andy

WinFX rebranded as .NET Framework 3.0

Andy Simonds — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 21:02:00 GMT

Friday we announced rebranding WinFX as .NET Framework 3.0. You can read about the details is Soma's blog.

- Andy

XPS at TechEd 2006

Andy Simonds — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 23:24:00 GMT

Microsoft TechEd 2006 is next week and we will have a session on XPS there. Marcio will be going solo with no support from his team, so if you are there, offer to carry something for him. Description of the session:

DEV324 Windows Vista As a Document Platform: Programming XPS and 2007 Microsoft Office System Documents with WPF

Day/Time: Tuesday, June 13 4:30 PM - 5:45 PM Room: 102 AB

Speaker(s): Marcio Mello

Applications create and edit data files that must be managed, protected, shared and validated. Attend this must-see session to discover how WinFX services simplify the management of XPS documents, the next version of Office documents, and your own application's data through the use of the WinFX package APIs and XPS-specific APIs. For example, learn how to apply and use rights management, digital signatures, and metadata. These services will be valuable if you're creating custom Office or XPS-based solutions.

There will also be a Virtual Tech·Ed where you should be able to see Marcio's presentation directly from your desktop. Tech-Ed is sold out, so if you aren't already attending the virtual session is your only option.

- Andy

Windows Vista Product Guide

Andy Simonds — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 18:25:00 GMT

The Windows Vista Product Guide is available up on ms.com. It seems to have finished its’ appearing-disappearing act and is up there permanently. Some links strangely point directly to the word doc forcing you to download a 60MB file instead of the smaller xps version. Here is the link to the page where you can make the choice between the two versions.

The doc is actually a great read about all the stuff in Windows Vista. A good chapter on XPS is in there.

- Andy

XPS, PDF and Adobe

Andy Simonds — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 00:58:00 GMT

So it is certainly an interesting news day today. For those interested in the world of PDF and XPS, you probably have already read the Wall Street Journal Article about changes we are making because of Adobe. There are also a few other articles that cover the story in case you do not have access to WSJ on-line:

CNET TG Daily

Brian Jones Blog also includes a discussion from the Office point of view.

Read Brian’s blog about PDF and Office. One thing I will add, is that the Office team is making both PDF and XPS ‘save-as’ support as free downloads, instead of built into Office directly. This is too bad, but is designed to try and resolve any concerns Adobe has with XPS or PDF functionality as part of Office.

Let me cover the Windows side of the story. For several years we have been sharing detailed plans on XPS with Adobe. I’d say almost to an excess, we kept them up to speed on our designs and implementation at every step and we’ve made a lot of design modifications based on their input. They attend our conferences and plug-fests (plug fest: a multi-day meeting at Microsoft where partners learn about new technologies and share implementations) and we value them as an important Microsoft partner. We see XPS as a platform and still believe that the advances we are making with XPS will have a lot of benefits to Adobe products as well as all the other millions of customers and partners that use the Windows platform

Unfortunately, Adobe has been pushing for us to remove XPS from Windows. Given the clear benefits of XPS to customers and partners, this is something we can not do. We are always sensitive to competitor complaints when we design Windows and we’ve tried to address any concerns Adobe may have. But, we have to first and foremost design our products for customers, not competitors. XPS support in many ways is a natural evolution to the Windows platform. Windows has always had a way to publish documents (in the form of printing) and it is natural to move the platform forward improving the quality of the output of documents, making them more programmable and enabling a seamless transition between view and print scenarios. This is what our customers have been asking from the Windows platform and this is what we are delivering with XPS. We are very excited to deliver innovations in Windows Vista that address long-standing customer needs.

That being said, in order to accommodate Adobe’s concerns, we have made it so OEMs making PCs can choose to not include XPS as part of Windows. The core printing enhancements that we have made in Windows, where we have used XPS as the spool file format, is not removable. Since this makes printing better for everyone, and since Adobe and anyone else that serves the printing market has keen interest in Windows printing improving, there is no contention on that functionality.

Since AIIM and WinHEC, a day does not go by where another customer or big ISV contacts us about building XPS into their document workflows. Some of these folks are extending XPS in new and exciting ways to provide unique solutions to their customers. These calls come in because they see value in XPS. XPS solves key customer problems and that will be the value that ultimately drives adoption.

- Andy

Brian Jones Blog about PDF in Office

Andy Simonds — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 19:58:00 GMT

Brian just posted an entry about the decision to remove PDF support from Office.

http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2006/06/02/613702.aspx

WinHEC and Beta 2

Andy Simonds — Thu, 25 May 2006 07:33:00 GMT

It’s been a big week. WinHEC is wrapping up and we have shipped Beta 2. Beta 2 is awesome (I have been 'XP-free' for several months and love it) and it means we are really headed towards shipping. I stopped by the Beta 2 ship party today here on campus where we had a live band, food and drinks for the entire Windows division (didn’t have my camera so no photos).

Yesterday I was able to catch the WinHEC keynote where Bill announced the trifecta of Betas (Vista Client, Server and Office 2007) and most importantly to see the keynote demo of XPS. It went off without a hitch, although it is so nerve-racking to watch a marketing guy who knows very little about our technology give a demo. We watch with apprehension, but finally, elation once it was over. Great exposure for XPS.

The buzz around XPS, Color and our Web Services for Devices work was outstanding. Lots of people seeing our demos, asking questions and lots of our partners showing off their demos built on our Vista technology. Lots of fun, just walking around the booths and hearing people talk about the technology we are building.

One of the amazing things we showed which probably will fly under the radar of the top-line press, is a demo of high-dynamic range, wide-gamut photo printing using the new imaging pipeline in Windows Vista. We showed a demo of printing from the Vista photo gallery a wide-gamut photograph stored in Windows Media Photo format to an XPS-enabled wide-gamut Epson photo printer. The output was great, you could really see the difference in the side-by-side comparison. The printer was being driven by a print driver put together for us by Software Imaging. For the consumer, the photo printer is able to deliver high quality prints using a wide color gamut without having to circumvent bottlenecks in the OS. With these advances in Windows Vista and with new XPS-capable wide gamut printers, this capability exists right out of the box.

Between Windows Media Photo, the new Windows Color System and XPS, a new level of color quality and fidelity is now achievable. We also had some color demos showing driving >8bpc out to some HDR monitors – stunning results.

We could not have done this without the help of a bunch of our partners. Mainly, Software Imaging, Epson and Monotype Imaging

It continues to be an active week in the press – some more press releases and announcements that cover technology from the D2 team:

Global Graphics continues its great work with XPS

Monotype Imaging to Demo WCS-Compliant Color Profiling Technology at WinHEC

Microsoft Unveils Windows Vista Beta 2

Lots of articles out there about Beta 2 shipping, most make some mention of XPS.

Microsoft presents new photo format for Vista

Play-by-Play of WinHEC Keynote

If you are a gluten for punishment, you car read the minute by minute run-downs of the WinHEC Keynote. The videos are also up on Microsoft.com. Will’s keynote with the XPS demo is here (XPS demo starts at the 10-minute mark).

Madcap software

I’m not familiar with this company, but buried in their press release on their latest financials is a comment about support XPS!