Browse by Tags

If you've attended one of the Open XML Developer workshops that I and others have delivered in the last few months, you probably received a bunch of presentations, hands-on labs with complete source code, lab manuals, and demo files. We passed out that content as takeaway items for all the attendees...

Office Programmability PM Kevin Boske has a new screencast on Channel 9 that takes you through how to work with the Office Open XML Code Snippets that are available as a free download on MSDN. There are 40 code snippets total, providing ready-to-use methods for common development chores ranging from...

Searching documents for text strings is a common task in many type of applications. And there are many possible variations on this simple concept: whether to search the body of the document or its metadata, whether to restrict your search to specific document types or document sections, and so on. At...

OK, what's the deal with WindowsBase.dll? It's the dll where the System.IO.Packaging API lives, and you have to add a reference to it in your project before you can use the packaging API. And it's never there at the end of the .NET tab on my "Add Reference" dialog. For example, here's my list , which...

Here at the Open XML workshop in Paris this week, Jerome Berthaud pointed out to me that my CreateXlsx sample program required a bit more than just updating to the final Ecma schemas in order to get it running under the RTM. It seems that there are some elements in the style part that are required, which...

Wouter Van Vugt has posted some useful information about the issues and options for validating XML schemas in .NET applications: Validating Open XML documents with System.Xml - A WordProcessingML sample . If you're writing code that works with schemas that have circular references to one another, as...

This post covers the code for a CreateXlsx program that creates a simple Open XML spreadsheet from scratch using the .NET Framework 3.0 packaging API (System.IO.Packaging), as well as two of the Open XML code snippets that are available on MSDN . Full source code for this sample is provided in the attached...

I had a lively conversation with my manager yesterday afternoon about C# programming conventions. I was arguing for clarity and readability, and he was arguing for consistency with prevailing C# coding conventions. I'm a big fan of using white space to aid readability, in all forms of written communication...

To clarify Microsoft's development-tools strategy and make it easier for developers to understand the growing Microsoft development platform, a new change has been announced this afternoon: WinFX will henceforth be known as version 3.0 of the .NET framework. This does not affect the technologies themselves...

I've recently started this MSDN blog, for covering Office 2007 separate from my personal blog . But I've posted a bunch of Office 2007 items on the personal blog since the first of the year, and I'd like to keep that content with this site going forward. So the following is a list of links to posts...

If you're looking to get started on Office 2007 development, there are a bunch of great new resources in the works. My colleague Don Campbell will be publishing some cool videos on MSDN and Channel 9 soon, full of specific developer techniques: how to extend the ribbon UI, how to write a MOSS web part...