John R. Durant's WebLog

Some years ago, I was downloading books from Project Gutenburg . I had finished couple of Masters degrees and a few years before had decided not finish off my doctoral dissertation. Nevertheless, I have retained this love of literature. Then, I thought...

When I say XML and Office 2003 , the next words that come to the minds of most Office developers (who stay up to date on things) is usually WordML . That is with good reason. However, Excel actually made the jump to more complete XML support before Word...

Blogging has made the Web relevant for me again. I have to be honest: the Internet has become a bit of a bore to me. I was becoming increasingly persuaded that if I am not interested in a new mortgage, body-enhancing snake oil, reading gossip, hate-mongering...

So, in this entry, I wanted to explain the processing instruction that I included in my C# app that extracts my Outlook tasks to XML. I create an XML file on the fly (I use my own XSD to constrain it- more on that Monday), and I add this bit to the top...

One of the things that ought to be simpler and more "front-and-center" is the detection of .NET runtime version, getting runtime environment information and updating the runtime. Yes, yes, yes- these things can be done right now, so it has not been overlooked...

We have a few new items on the ODC. First, we have an article about Excel and XML. Peter Vogel does a great job explaining XML Maps and the like. Check it out: http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/odc_xl2003_ta/html/odc_xl_Excel2003XMLIntro...

InfoPath is a truly interesting product. I have to be honest and say that prior to October of last year, I knew little about it. I had installed it but never used it (if you are an Office executive an reading this, please know that I was busy writing...

Coming to work here nearly a year ago, I already had an appreciation for SDKs. They are some of the greatest treasures a developer can find. In all my development experience, I have found that Microsoft SDKs are really quite good. But, what does it take...

All right, it's time I quit answering email and get back to my blog (for those of you waiting for something from me- you now know why it has to wait!). In this entry, I will describe the XSD I use for this little sample, and then I will get into the manifest...

Well, I come to the end of this little series. In this entry, I will show you some of the XSL I wrote to format my Word document from the XML file. It's not too hard to follow, but I will focus only on the most interesting parts. I have trimmed out some...

In an earlier blog I talked about how intrigued I was by Live Communications Server 2003. It is easy to predict that the types of services it provides are only hint of how far things will go. Adding "presence" to various applications, working with SIP...

If you read my blog a few entries ago about what it takes to publish an SDK on MSDN, then you will know what I mean when I say that our the SDK for smart tags is now online (in addition to the already published download). Here is the link to the main...

In this entry, I explain my manifest file (I'm getting a fair amount of email asking me to show this part!). Remember, a manifest is a file that Word will look at as it loads the target document to see if it needs to load any additional resources. The...

Frank Rice has a new article out there for those interested in figuring out how to use VB.NET to work with XML and Excel. http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/?url=/library/en-us/odc_xl2003_ta/html/odc_xlxmlxfer.asp Check out the ODC for more articles, downloads...