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[Blog Map] This blog is inactive. New blog: EricWhite.com/blog 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...

[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 grammar is a device to define syntax for a language. A grammar is made up of rules, sometimes called productions. Each rule defines a symbol, when can then be further used in other rules. Grammars are not hard to understand; most developers...

[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 Some time ago, I blogged about an approach for converting an XElement object to an XmlNode object , and vice versa. This is useful when you want to use a programming interface that takes and returns objects of type XmlNode, but you want...

[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 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 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 Last January, I blogged about an approach to normalizing LINQ to XML trees . That post is based on another post, Manually Cloning LINQ to XML Trees . In those posts, my code to clone an element would clone a self-closing element (<Tag...

[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...

[Blog Map] This blog is inactive. New blog: EricWhite.com/blog LINQ to XML code is highlighted in yellow . Open XML SDK strongly typed object model is highlighted in green . using System; using System.IO; using System.Linq; using System.Xml; using System.Xml.Linq; using DocumentFormat.OpenXml.Packaging;...

Code highlighted in yellow shows navigating from the package to the main document part. Code highlighted in green shows navigating from the main document part to the styles part. using System; using System.Linq; using System.IO; using System.IO.Packaging; using System.Xml; using System...

[Blog Map] This blog is inactive. New blog: EricWhite.com/blog There is an interesting approach that we use in PowerTools for Open XML that makes it easy to write cmdlets that modify Open XML documents. This approach isn’t very complicated, but aspects of this approach need some explanation...

[Blog Map] This blog is inactive. New blog: EricWhite.com/blog DocumentBuilder is an example class that’s part of the PowerTools for Open XML project that enables you to assemble new documents from existing documents. One of the problems to solve when moving markup from one document to another...

[Blog Map] This blog is inactive. New blog: EricWhite.com/blog In my first version of my functional programming tutorial , I discussed a ForEach extension method, but I removed the topic from the second version. This extension method iterates through a source collection and performs an action on each...

[Blog Map] This blog is inactive. New blog: EricWhite.com/blog One of the most effective ways to generate Open XML documents, spreadsheets, or presentations is to start with a ‘template’ document and then modify the document. For instance, you can start with a blank word processing document...

[Blog Map] This blog is inactive. New blog: EricWhite.com/blog In two previous posts , I developed a somewhat involved query to search through a word processing document for style names and/or paragraph content. This is a query that I’m developing for the PowerTools for Open XML project . In...

[Blog Map] This blog is inactive. New blog: EricWhite.com/blog In some scenarios, it is useful to compute a ‘deep’ hash code using LINQ to XML. If you are writing a server-side application that caches queries expressed in XML, then you may want to store these queries in a hash table. XNode...

[Blog Map] This blog is inactive. New blog: EricWhite.com/blog I believe that it is easier to maintain code that is written in the functional style. For one thing, this is the very reason for many of the characteristics of functional code. No state is maintained, so we don’t have to worry about...