October 2006 - Posts

Office Developer Map Poster
31 October 06 02:34 PM

A while back, I mentioned a "Developer Map for the 2007 Microsoft Office System" poster that Erika was working on. Well, the final version is available now, suitable for printing and hanging, use as your Windows wallpaper, inspiration for a tattoo, or Read More...

Postedby dmahugh | 0 Comments    

Samples from the Ecma spec
27 October 06 03:55 PM

I've been going through the final draft version of the Ecma Office Open XML spec , to put together some samples for a project I'm working on. And in the course of doing so, I've been pleasantly surprised by how many markup examples can be found in the Read More...

Postedby dmahugh | 0 Comments    

Filed under: Open XML

Open XML Podcasts
25 October 06 08:20 PM

If you're too busy to learn about the Open XML file formats, here's something to do on the way home from work tonight: listen to some podcasts about Open XML. It won't take a single minute out of your day, and you'll get an overview of how the formats Read More...

Postedby dmahugh | 0 Comments    

Filed under: Open XML

Backward Compatibility
19 October 06 11:44 PM

Before I started at Microsoft, I worked at a wholesale auto auction for a few years. In 1999-2000, I wrote a line-of-business app for the auction in Visual FoxPro, and we called that app SERVIS. (That was a derivative of "customer SERVice Information Read More...

Postedby dmahugh | 3 Comments    

Converting SpreadsheetML to generic XML
17 October 06 10:19 PM

Muthy Kumar Arjunan has written an interesting article entitled "XSL transformation of SpreadsheetML to generic XML" that is posted on OpenXmlDeveloper.org . The article, which includes complete XSL and source code, shows how to use XSL to transform a Read More...

Postedby dmahugh | 0 Comments    

Filed under: Open XML

Office and Open XML: now available in 7 languages
17 October 06 06:04 PM

Don Campbell beat me to it, but this is so good I want to mention it too: MSDN's Erika Ehrli has posted an interactive version of the Developer Map for the 2007 Microsoft Office System poster that she has been putting together. It's three things in one: Read More...

Postedby dmahugh | 1 Comments    

Virtual PC 2007 beta
12 October 06 12:54 PM

Now that I've flattened my laptop and gone to running nothing but Vista, I need to re-install all the applications I use in my work. And one application I use a lot is Virtual PC. We use it for demos, proof-of-concepts, and for re-creating all the various Read More...

Postedby dmahugh | 3 Comments    

Open XML diff utility
11 October 06 02:33 PM

Many people have asked me about a Diff tool for Open XML: something that would show what has changed in an Open XML document, so that you can compare two versions of a document and easily see the differences. A diff tool for Open XML is not a trivial Read More...

Postedby dmahugh | 2 Comments    

Filed under: Open XML

Vista RC2: goodbye, XP
10 October 06 09:48 AM

Well, I've taken the plunge: I flattened my laptop yesterday, and installed Vista RC2 (5744) and the latest Office release candidate (4518.1006). So far I love it, and I haven't encountered anything in the first 24 hours that looks like a bug. This is Read More...

Postedby dmahugh | 2 Comments    

Paris MOSS Workshop
04 October 06 02:55 PM

The Paris workshop has been going great, with an all-star team of MOSS experts supporting the ISVs in their development of leading-edge applications on the MOSS 2007 platform. For this one we have Jeff Fattic of Quilogy, Hannes DeCorte of U2U, Jimmy Löfkvist Read More...

Postedby dmahugh | 1 Comments    

Programmatically creating content controls
02 October 06 03:30 AM

The concept of content controls is one of the most powerful features in the new Open XML file formats. It allows developers to truly separate the presentation of custom XML fields in a rich word-processing document from the underlying XML nodes themselves. Read More...

Postedby dmahugh | 0 Comments