In the previous post I created a class that was going to be used as an interface between a large file editor and the file on the disk. Since then I've been implementing the user interface and, obviously, the RevisionStream also needed some readjustment...

The purpose of this series of two blog posts is to illustrate how an editor for large files can be implemented. The first part will address the model behind the editor whereas the second part will include an actual UserControl that allows users to view...

Let’s say you want to see where a certain setting from Word Options is saved in Registry. The easiest method is using Process Monitor. Add a filter on Process Name and Operation, start Word and that’s that: If we uncheck “Allow background...

Let's start off with the following observation- the following two shapes have the same Left and Top coordinates: What's different is obviously the rotation. What Office saves for a shape is the Left and Top coordinates together with a Rotation....

Looking for some code samples how to pass DDE messages from a .NET program I found out that there‘s a great library already in place that facilitates working with DDE: the NDde project from Codeplex: http://ndde.codeplex.com/ However, I just...

Three easy steps for exporting .NET functionality to VBA: 1. Write a source file: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Runtime.InteropServices; using System.Windows.Forms;...

The PPT file format is very well documented as per Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise. However, accessing any part of a PPT file isn’t really a snap. I’ve created a small C# program which parses the \Pictures stream from a PPT...

Editing Excel OpenXML documents using the OpenXML 2.0 SDK offers better performace and improved supportability compared to normal Office automation (e.g. VBA). There are also great examples on the Internet to get started: Office Open XML Formats: Inserting...

The operation of indenting XML files is pretty trivial when using the classes from the System.XML namespace. However, I often find myself trying to read canonical XML code from files. As such, a created a very simple tool that converts XML files to indented...

The sample code from my previous post does a pretty good job listing the styles in a Word document. However, having a preview of these styles makes it a lot easier to spot the subtle differences than by using the Description object. For generating...

When dealing with Styles in Word you can never have too much control. This is when a listing of the existing styles and their descriptions helps a lot. Happily VBA provides a powerful way of getting details about a certain style through the Description...

This is just a summary on the new Windows 7 features and how these can be implemented in .NET. There is plenty documentation on both Windows Presentation Foundation and the Windows 7 SDK but actually implementing a solution is a bit harder. So here...

Recently I’ve been looking for some piece of code that would perform XML highlighting in a Rich Text Box. The Internet provides several free samples and several commercial samples but I wasn’t really satisfied with what I found, mainly because...

Going further on the Windows Metafile problematic from a previous post , I’ve created a sample code for illustration a pretty useful functionality from OLE. What the OLE function implemented here does is to generate a metafile with the icon and...

In a previous post , I was discussing the idea of adding more events to Excel by adding a window hook. Under the hood, the idea is that we can load a DLL in the Excel process simply by transforming that DLL into a COM add-in, which is automatically loaded...

As a developer of Automation solutions for Microsoft Office one might feel the need of some extra events. Quoting from the MSDN VBA Object Model reference, here is the list of events from the Excel.Application object: AfterCalculate Event CalculationDone...

A common belief regarding the EMF format, at least as it appears by browsing technical blog posts, is that this format was never documented by Microsoft and that there are many unknown facts about it. This opinion is wrong, as the format has complete...

I’m posting here a tool that can be used for viewing and modifying OLE storage. The syntax is as follows: Usage: OLElsTool.exe <File_In> <Options> -L: list -X <part> <toFile>: extract part -M <part> <fromFile>...

After the previous blog posts with the OpenDoc tool, I’ve learned that, while this tool can be very helpful, it also raises a lot of questions mainly because it lacks proper documentation. As such, I’ve decided to post the source code giving...

In a previous post , I described a tool for editing OpenXML documents from a managed context. I've added three more features for some common tasks: 1. Remove a part Syntax: OpenDoc.exe -r <Input file> <Part> Sample usage scenarios...

The default format for saving Excel, Word and PowerPoint documents has luckily changed since Office 2007 to the Open XML formats. There is good documentation available for these formats on: MSDN: Introduction to the Office 2007 file formats: ...

Topic This is a post that contains a tool for analyzing the external links in an Excel Workbook. The tool is intended to provide information regarding the linked workbooks, the cells from a workbook that contain external links, as well as the...

Introduction Getting near to the cause of an application crash once one has a crash dump is one of the easiest debugging tasks. The main problem in these cases is how to actually acquire a crash dump. This post discusses some basic scenarios for getting...

Creating a managed Smart Document project or Add-in for Office 2003 is a bit of a headache because of the many configuration problems one might encounter. Here is a short summary of the prerequisites of such a project on a target system: ...

Just short piece of information about Remote Debugging. Remote Debugging actually means connecting the debugger on one computer to a process on another computer. Typical scenario: PC 1 has a program that needs to be debugged. PC 2 does the debugging...