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A while back a posted how to use Word to create simple reports for LightSwitch by passing in an entity (like Customer) and using Word Content Controls to lay out content in a template and bind them to XML inside the document. If you missed it: Using Microsoft Word to Create Reports For LightSwitch (or...

A while back Paul Patterson wrote an awesome step-by-step blog post based on a forum question on how to send an automated email using System.Net.Mail from LightSwitch . If you missed it here it is: Microsoft LightSwitch – Send an Email from LightSwitch This is a great solution if you want...

Note: This post has been updated for Beta 2 on 3/24/2011 LightSwitch has a really nice feature on data grids that allow you to export them to Excel if running as a Desktop application (out of browser). This gives you a basic way of getting data out of the system to create reports or do further...

Jet lag, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy. That’s been my week so far preparing all the awesome content we have in store for you for Monday’s Visual Studio 2010 launch! Unfortunately this week has also taken me away from blogging and I have some fun stories from DevDays Netherlands and TechDays Belgium where...

Many programs that need to process documents often require manipulation of the file formats directly and doing that through the Office component object model (COM) won’t scale very well. It also requires that Microsoft Office be installed to run. A better route in a lot of these cases is to use the Open...

Yesterday I posted about how we could create a letter generator (mail merge) that took data from a database to create a Word 2007 document using the System.IO.Packaging class. I showed how to take data from Northwind using a single LINQ query to create XDocument objects representing letters to customers...

With the release of Microsoft Office 2007 we can work with a much simpler, standard, XML format called Open XML which opens the door for many types of applications that cannot work via COM. What if you needed to build a scalable web service that processes many documents in high volume? What if you wanted...

This month I have an article on DevProConnections: Taking Advantage of LINQ and XML in Microsoft Office 2007 In this article, I talk about how a lot of applications that need to take advantage of Microsoft Office can do so without going through COM. Many programs that need to process documents...

I was cleaning up my desk today and in the piles of mail and gobs of paper I found the SDN Magazine “Women in Technology” issue 101 that featured an article I wrote that was released in print back in May. Well, I just noticed today that near the end of June they made most of the articles available online...

Yesterday Carl posted another dnrTV show with yours truly . This time I’m talking about the Open XML SDK , something that I’ve written and spoken about many times . In this episode I show how to use Word 2007 content controls and map them to custom XML parts so that you can query structured data from...

In my last few posts we've been building a simple Office Business Application (OBA) for the new Northwind Traders. If you missed them: OBA Part 1 - Exposing Line-of-Business Data OBA Part 2 - Building and Outlook Client against LOB Data In this post I'm going to talk about how we can create a purchase...

I'm here in the Netherlands in a town called Noordwijkerhout near Amsterdam at the SDN Conference with a lot of great speakers and sessions . I took these shots while the attendees were in session. There's good food, great vendors and lots of entertainment -- XBoxes, bowling, pin-pong, and lots...

Yesterday I received an email from another employee here at Microsoft to check out this tool called Open XML Diff that he was working on. His name is Pranav Wagh and he just released another drop of the tool which you can read about oh his blog . You can use Open XML Diff when writing code to generate...

About a month ago the Open XML SDK 1.0 (June 08 update) was released . The SDK provides strongly typed document part access to Word 2007, Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007 documents. The SDK has been a CTP for a while, but last month version 1.0 was finally released. So I installed this baby last week and...

I've mentioned before that you can use XML literals in VB 9 to do text merging so I figured it should be pretty easy to do some mail merging in Word the same way. Word 2007 (and Excel, etc) now uses a standard XML format called Office Open XML to describe documents so I thought this would be the perfect...

One really handy thing to do with relational data is to import and export it to Excel. This can be a total snap using LINQ to XML in Visual Basic 2008. For example, let's say I want to import data from an Excel spreadsheet into a local database file like SQL Compact Edition. I also want to be able to...