Miscellaneous Links, 04/22/2009

Catching up on links to blog posts I’ve found interesting this month …

I was on vacation the first week of April, and missed out on the announcement of the release of the Open XML SDK Version 2 April CTP.  Zeyad Rajabi has details of the SDK version 2 over on Brian Jones’s blog, including a great example of the validation technology that is being built into the SDK.  Zeyad also has a new post this week on how to remove comments from Excel and PowerPoint files.

Stephen Peront, who will be in London at the DII workshop on May 18, has posted an example of how to use the new External File Converter API in Office 2007 SP2.  This API gives developers the ability to add their own custom formats to Office’s list of supported formats – the list that appears in the dropdowns on the File/Open and Save/As dialogs.

Eric White has an overview of the tradeoffs involved in choosing between the DocumentBuilder class in the Open XML Power Tools and the altChunk functionality in the Open XML spec and another post on DocumentBuilder that covers using DocumentBuild with content controls for document assembly.

Speaking of the Open XML Power Tools, there’s a new version out.  Eric also has a post on the Release of PowerTools for Open XML V1.1.1 and a guide to getting started with PowerTools development, and Lawrence Hodson has a post on OpenXMLDeveloper.org that covers how to generate form letters using the PowerTools for Open XML and PowerShell scripting.

Gray Knowlton has announced the OfficePalooza VBA contest, which includes challenges for every level of VBA developer, from casual users to advanced VBA experts.  If you know how to use VBA to make Office apps sing and dance, it’s a great opportunity to show off your skills.  More info on the OfficePalooza site.

Rick Jelliffe blogged about the makeup of the ODF TC while I was in Prague at the SC 34/WG4 meeting.  The comment thread has an interesting exchange of opinions between Rick, Rob Weir, and Bruce D’Arcus.

Jesper Lund Stocholm has a series of posts on various aspects of the proposed change to IS29500 namespaces (as submitted in a Swiss defect report) that has been the subject of discussion and debate within WG4.  First he talked about ISO 8601 dates, then document protection, and most recently MCE (Markup Compatibility & Extensibility).  These posts offer a good overview of the issues and options under consideration by WG4.

Finally, here’s a photo I took Monday evening of the 520 bridge, which connects the “east side” (the area around Microsoft’s Redmond campus) to downtown Seattle …