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Due to personal obligations (moving away from Seattle) it is with sadness that I’m announcing that I’m leaving Microsoft. My last day at Microsoft will be January 21. This will be the last post on this blog. I will be commencing to blog at EricWhite.com/blog . Here is what I'm planning for...

[Blog Map] This blog is inactive. New blog: EricWhite.com/blog In this post, I complete the recursive descent parser that will parse the simple grammar that I presented previously in this series. In this post, I’ll examine in detail the NospaceExpression class, which needs to implement operator...

[Blog Map] This blog is inactive. New blog: EricWhite.com/blog In this post, I further enhance the recursive descent parser that will parse the simple grammar that I presented previously in this series. I’ll examine some more classes that represent symbols in that grammar. The classes I present...

[Blog Map] This blog is inactive. New blog: EricWhite.com/blog In this post, I present the start of a recursive descent parser that will parse the simple grammar that I presented previously in this series. I’ll point out some key features of the code so that it is easy to see how the code works...

[Blog Map] This blog is inactive. New blog: EricWhite.com/blog Tables are a feature in Open XML spreadsheets that allow you to interact with data more like a database. You can select a region and convert it to a table. Most Excel aficionados are familiar with this feature. It is very useful. ...

[Blog Map] This blog is inactive. New blog: EricWhite.com/blog A key operation when doing pure functional transformations is the process of creating complex hierarchies of objects. We see this when transforming some data source (such as an Open XML WordprocessingML document) to a LINQ to XML tree...

[Blog Map] This blog is inactive. New blog: EricWhite.com/blog To learn how recursive descent parsers work, it is helpful to implement a very simple grammar, so for pedagogical purposes, I’ve defined a grammar for simple arithmetic expressions. The parser will construct a syntax tree from expressions...

[Blog Map] This blog is inactive. New blog: EricWhite.com/blog Recursive descent parsers are one of the easier types of parsers to implement. Given a properly defined grammar, you write a class for each production in the grammar, and you write one fairly simple method in each class. Each of those...

[Blog Map] This blog is inactive. New blog: EricWhite.com/blog At one point while debugging the HtmlConverter class , when I found certain situations in the XML, I wanted to dump the XML in binary to see the actual hex values of characters being used. I got tired of stopping and examining the values...

[Blog Map] This blog is inactive. New blog: EricWhite.com/blog I regularly use functional programming and LINQ in two contexts – when writing code that is part of an example or tool that will potentially execute millions of times, and when writing ad-hoc queries. These days, I use C# and LINQ...

[Blog Map] This blog is inactive. New blog: EricWhite.com/blog Recently, I had need for a new extension method for IEnumerable<T>, which I call "Rollup". This extension method is sort of a cross between the Select and Aggregate extension methods. Like Select, when using this extension method...

[Blog Map] This blog is inactive. New blog: EricWhite.com/blog This is one in a series of posts on transforming Open XML WordprocessingML to XHtml. You can find the complete list of posts here . I need to write out some XHtml, and in several places, I want that XHtml to contain entities references...

[Blog Map] This blog is inactive. New blog: EricWhite.com/blog This is one in a series of posts on transforming Open XML WordprocessingML to XHtml. You can find the complete list of posts here . When implementing a conversion of Open XML word processing documents to HTML, one of the interesting...

[Blog Map] This blog is inactive. New blog: EricWhite.com/blog This is one in a series of posts on transforming Open XML WordprocessingML to XHtml. You can find the complete list of posts here . Some XML vocabularies implement a powerful XML pattern that is analogous to inheritance in programming...

[Blog Map] This blog is inactive. New blog: EricWhite.com/blog This is one in a series of posts on transforming Open XML WordprocessingML to XHtml. You can find the complete list of posts here . Over the last couple of weeks, and over the next week, I've been designing and writing some code to...

[Blog Map] This blog is inactive. New blog: EricWhite.com/blog This is one in a series of posts on transforming Open XML WordprocessingML to XHtml. You can find the complete list of posts here . Last week, I blogged about a small project that I'm embarking on: to make a reasonably accurate transform...

[Blog Map] This blog is inactive. New blog: EricWhite.com/blog This is one in a series of posts on transforming Open XML WordprocessingML to XHtml. You can find the complete list of posts here . Over the next couple of weeks, I'm going to spend some time writing some LINQ to XML code to transform...

[Blog Map] This blog is inactive. New blog: EricWhite.com/blog There are some circumstances where I need a variation on the DescendantsAndSelf axis method that allows me to specify that specific elements (and the descendants of those elements) are ‘trimmed’ from the returned collection...

[Blog Map] This blog is inactive. New blog: EricWhite.com/blog Word 2007 has a feature where you can lock a document, preventing any changes to content, yet allowing the user to add comments. CommentMerger is a small method (~400 lines of code) that merges comments from two documents into a single...

[Blog Map] This blog is inactive. New blog: EricWhite.com/blog Microsoft Word 2007 allows you to lock a document, prohibiting users from making changes to content, while allowing them to add comments. If we have multiple documents that have the same content yet different comments, we can merge those...

[Blog Map] This blog is inactive. New blog: EricWhite.com/blog Writing pure functional transformations a in a recursive style enables us to put together interesting transformations in a very small amount of code. Using some specific techniques that allow us to write this code very concisely, this...

[Blog Map] This blog is inactive. New blog: EricWhite.com/blog When thought of in a certain way, XML documents come in two flavors – data-centric and document-centric. Further, there are two types of document-centric documents. This post presents my thoughts about approaches to various types...

[Blog Map] This blog is inactive. New blog: EricWhite.com/blog Sometimes we want to compare two word processing documents to see if they contain the same content. I’m working on a blog post to merge comments from multiple Open XML documents into a single document. This is based on a feature...

[Blog Map] This blog is inactive. New blog: EricWhite.com/blog (Update June 25, 2009 - fixed bugs in event handlers associated with deleting last node and inserting node at beginning of list) Occasionally I need to query LINQ to XML nodes in reverse document order. I’m currently writing some...

[Blog Map] This blog is inactive. New blog: EricWhite.com/blog Often XML schemas allow for optional elements and attributes. When you write queries on these elements or attributes, you may be tempted to write code that does lots of testing for null. There is a better way to do this, laid out in this...