Doug Mahugh : Open XML

Planning the maintenance of IS29500

dmahugh — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 22:23:00 GMT

I'm in London this week for meetings with SC 34 Ad-Hoc Group 1 (AHG1) and Ecma TC45. I suppose London is an appropriate place for standards bodies to meet, having had a newspaper called the Standard for nearly 200 years.

SC 34 AHG1 Meeting

The AHG1 meeting took place on Monday and Tuesday at the British Library. The goal of this meeting was to come up with a set of recommendations for SC 34 regarding the structure and activities of WG4, the new working group to be created for maintaining IS29500. Alex Brown, the AHG1 convenor, led the discussion and wrote the recommendations on the screen while the other attendees all discussed and debated various possibilities. At the end of the second day we reviewed the resulting document to tighten it up a bit, and the final outcome of the meeting is available for all to see on the SC 34 web site.

Jesper Lund Stocholm, one of two attendees representating Denmark, has posted his commentary on the meeting, and I don't have much to add to what he had to say. It was a productive two days, and we had the benefit of several deep experts in the JTC 1 Directives that govern this type of work, who kept us all focused on the task at hand.

IS29500 maintenance will proceed under the ISO jurisdiction in WG4 of SC 34, with participation by NB members and liaison organizations. The pace will be brisk, with conference calls taking place "as often as necessary (e.g. weekly)." I've participated in TC45's weekly calls for some time, and have recently started participating in the OASIS ODF TC's weekly calls. That sort of rhythm really keeps things moving, and I suspect it will keep the project editor and editing team very busy.

TC45 will play an active role in the maintenance process, and we all agreed that “SC 34 and Ecma will make best efforts to cooperate to ensure versions of ISO/IEC 29500 and Ecma 376 are kept synchronized.” Ecma will publish updated versions of the specification, as is their practice with jointly developed standards, but we all agreed that nobody benefits from having the latest version of the standard available from only one organization and not the other. That's why we included specific text about the goal of synchronization in our recommendations to SC 34.

Ecma TC45 Meeting

After two days of AHG1 meetings, today I attended the Ecma TC45 meeting, also hosted by the British Library. (Thank you, Adam.) We couldn't get started on maintenance, of course, but several of us were here for the AHG1 meeting anyway, so it was a good opportunity to review our plans for participating in SC 34's maintenance plan going forward.

The next step in IS29500 maintenance will take place at the SC 34 plenary in October (Jeju, Republic of Korea), where SC 34 members will make the final decisions on how WG4 will be structured, based on the recommendations from AHG1.

And now I'm off to find a pub. The Evening Standard unfortunately stopped selecting a Pub of the Year last year (why?), and the pubs on Weir Road are a bit too far away (hi Rob :-)), so I'll just wander the King's Cross area and see what I find. As they say in these parts, Cheers!

Links for 07-15-2008

dmahugh — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 05:09:00 GMT

Eric White on Linq and Open XML. Eric White has been posting some great code samples lately, including a sample of functional programming with the Open XML SDK, how to transform flat data into a hierarchy with Linq, and a set of blog posts on Writing robust Linq to XML code that performs well.

Orcmid on Interop. Like Eric, Dennis Hamilton has been blogging prolifically this summer, with a series of posts in the last week on interop topics: Interoperability: The Experience of It , Interoperability: No Code Need Apply?, and Interoperability: What's the Self-Interest?.

PowerShell and Open XML. A few recent posts on working with Open XML documents from PowerShell scripts:

Julien Chable has joined the Open XML Power Tools dev team, and he has an interesting post (in English, no less!) on Using PowerShell to Secure and Exchange Your Open XML Documents.
Eric White covers the availability of a Power Tools binary installation from the folks at StaffDotNet.
Antonio Zamora of StaffDotNet has a post on Applying a corporate style to Open Xml Documents by using Power Tools for Open Xml.
I also saw through Eric's blog an interesting post from Doug Finke on PowerShell and Open XML.

ODF translator version 2.0, Milestone 1 released. Functionality in the latest release of the ODF translator project is covered on the translator project blog. The next release is planned for August.

Office Binary Translator release. The M2 version of the binary translator project was released last week, and Wolfgang Keber has some additional info on the B2X blog.

Erika's Latest Project. Erika Ehrli is going to take a few months off to become a Mom! She'll be missed around here, but we're all very happy for her. I've heard rumors that Erika and Wouter (another new parent) have a bet going on whose kid will learn .NET development first.

Open XML links for 06-22-2008

dmahugh — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 01:32:00 GMT

Here are some interesting blog posts from the last week, as well as a few items I had missed while I was at TechEd but discovered while catching up on my RSS feeds today ...

Wouter Van Vugt has an excellent post on "Embedding repeating elements in a schema-mapped document" that shows how to use the <customXml> element with repeating data structures in WordprocessingML tables.

Eric White has two posts last week of interest to users of the Open XML Power Tools, including "PowerTools Script that Generates a Table in an Open XML Document" and "Much Improved Approach for Automatic Document Generation using PowerTools." The latter introduces the work of Doug Finke, a new contributor to the Power Tools project on Codeplex.

Peter O'Kelly and Guy Creese have updated the Burton Group whitepaper "What’s Up, .DOC? ODF, Open XML, and the Revolutionary Implications of XML in Productivity Applications" to include information and perspective on recent events that have taken place since the approval of IS29500. The paper will be presented at Burton's Catalyst Conference in San Diego next week.

Rick Jelliffe's "A new test for objectivity" prompted an interesting exchange with Alex Brown on the matter of Britian's High Court's rejection of an application for judicial review of BSI's position on IS29500, and Alex's post "OOXML Hit into the Long Grass" adds more details on the matter.

Another recent Rick Jelliffe post worth reading is "the era of closed formats is dead," which includes some interesting perspective from South African standards activist Bob Jolliffe and prolific XML/Java author Elliotte Rusty Harold. (By the way, if you're responsible for maintaining lots of HTML content — and who isn't these days? — check out out ERH's handy new book "Refactoring HTML," which he's serializing on his The Cafes blog.)

Alex Brown has information about XML UK's XML in the Office conference, scheduled for this Thursday at Reading Town Hall. The event will include a full day of hands-on presentations from Alex, Inigo Surguy, and many others, including my UK colleague Matt Deacon.

Open XML diff tools

dmahugh — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:49:00 GMT

When learning about Open XML or developing Open XML solutions, it's very common to find yourself wondering "what's the difference between these two documents?" For example, you may see something in a document that you'd like to recreate programmatically, so you want to know what markup would be required. Or perhaps you've modified a document manually (using Word, say) and you want to know what markup changes were caused by your edits.

In those situations, a diff utility can save a lot of time. I'll cover two good options for comparing Open XML documents below: Eric White's free command-line tool OpenXmlDiff, which comes with source code and can be useful in automated workflows, and Altova's commercial GUI tool DiffDog, which offers a variety of interactive capabilities for analyzing the differences between Open XML documents.

Eric White's OpenXmlDiff

Eric White recently had a need for an Open XML diff utility, and he decided to create a tool from scratch. The result was OpenXmlDiff, a simple and straightforward command-line tool that generates a report of all the differences between two Open XML documents. The diff report is written to console output, so you can easily redirect it to a text file or another program. Eric has put together a screencast that provides a concise 3-minute overview of how to download and use OpenXmlDiff.

OpenXmlDiff uses the XML Diff and Patch Utility (a free download on MSDN) to analyze the differences between the same XML part within two different Open XML documents. That tool identifies the specific changes that would be need to transform one XML document (i.e., OPC part) into another, and OpenXmlDiff handles the details of the OPC package and generates a well-organized output report that summarizes differences at the package level and then shows the specific details for parts that differ.

OpenXmlDiff is a good option if you want to study source code or extend a tool on your own, and it's also free. For those who want more of a slick GUI tool for comparing Open XML documents, there's another good option ...

Altova's DiffDog

I had the pleasure of meeting Alexander Falk in person at TechEd two weeks ago, and we had lunch and talked about our mutual interests including XML standards, Open XML tools, and — most of all — photography. Ironically, we got so busy talking about photography that I forgot to take a picture of Alex, but I did snap a couple of photos of their booth, where a variety of Altova employees (including Tara and Erin, pictured) were on hand to answer questions and do demos.

Altova's suite of XML tools has been evolving rapidly, and one of the areas where they've added quite a bit of functionality lately is Open XML support. For example, Alex blogged recently about how to use Altova's MapForce to auto-generate C# code that creates an Open XML spreadsheet, and their XMLSpy and StyleVision products also provide built-in support for the Open XML formats.

Another Altova tool that can be very useful to Open XML developers is DiffDog, a full-featured general-purpose diff/merge utility that supports any type of text file and also offers XML-aware differencing and support for Open XML documents (i.e., OPC packages) and ZIP files.

DiffDog's "XML-aware" approach means that it's smart about how to organize differences in XML documents for various visualizations (text view, grid view), and it also provides options for how to handle whitespace, CDATA, ordering of attributes (semantically meaningless, but sometimes important to a developer) and many other XML-specific details. And with full support for parts in ZIP packages, you can easily use DiffDog on Open XML documents. Download the free 30-day trial version and check it out.

Open XML Power Tools

dmahugh — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 18:40:00 GMT

Hot on the heels of the release of Version 1 of the Open XML SDK earlier this week, Eric White has posted information about a cool project that is built with the SDK: the Open XML Power Tools project.

the Open XML Power Tools are a set of PowerShell cmdlets that can be used to automate various document management tasks. Each cmdlet does one thing, such as removing metadata or adding a chart or digital signature, and the cmdlets can be strung together in PowerShell scripts. This enables creation of simple custom solutions entirely in PowerShell.

In addition, the Power Tools are great examples of how to use the Open XML Formats SDK for common tasks such as creating a chart in a spreadsheet or adding a watermark to a word-processing document. Full source code is available on the Codeplex site, and the first release includes all of these cmdlets:

Accept-OpenXmlChange
Add-OpenXmlContent
Add-OpenXmlDigitalSignature
Add-OpenXmlDocumentIndex
Add-OpenXmlDocumentTOA
Add-OpenXmlDocumentTOC
Add-OpenXmlDocumentTOF
Add-OpenXmlPicture
Export-OpenXmlSpreadsheet
Export-OpenXmlToHtml
Export-OpenXmlWordprocessing
Get-OpenXmlBackground
Get-OpenXmlComment
Get-OpenXmlCustomXmlData
Get-OpenXmlDigitalSignature
Get-OpenXmlDocument
Get-OpenXmlFooter
Get-OpenXmlHeader
Get-OpenXmlStyle
Get-OpenXmlTheme
Get-OpenXmlWatermark
Lock-OpenXmlDocument
Remove-OpenXmlComment
Remove-OpenXmlDigitalSignature
Set-OpenXmlBackground
Set-OpenXmlContentFormat
Set-OpenXmlContentStyle
Set-OpenXmlCustomXmlData
Set-OpenXmlFooter
Set-OpenXmlHeader
Set-OpenXmlStyle
Set-OpenXmlTheme
Set-OpenXmlWatermark

The fastest way to learn more about the Open XML Power Tools project is to watch Eric White's screencast of the Power Tools in action. In just a few minutes you'll see exactly how to install and use the Power Tools, and some examples of what they can do.

TechEd/IT Pro

We've had some interesting discussions with IT pros this week at TechEd/IT Pro. I've worked an Open XML booth at quite a few developer events, but this is my first IT pro event, and there some consistent differences in perspective.

The attendees this week are very interested in deployment, security, and file size issues, whereas last week (during TechEd/Developer) the attendees were most interested in API and tool support for the Open XML formats. So last week we had many questions about the Open XML SDK, and this week we've talked more about the Compatibility Pack and the Office Migration Planning Manager.

The release of the Open XML Power Tools this week is good timing for the IT pro crowd, and several people have left the booth today with plans to download the first release and put it immediately to work. We've also heard good feedback on some of the things that would be useful in future power tool cmdlets. It's an open-source project, so anybody can sign up and make contributions.

And in between Open XML discussions, I've been auditioning for a possible new job as you can see below. :-) Wish me luck!

Open XML SDK Version 1 released

dmahugh — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 04:15:00 GMT

Version 1 of the Open XML SDK is now available for free download from MSDN. Here are the links:

Open XML Formats SDK download link:
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=120908
Open XML Formats SDK documentation:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb448854.aspx
MSDN Forum: Open XML Format SDK:
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=1647&SiteID=1
What's New in the Open XML Format SDK 1.0:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc471858.aspx
Changes in the April 2008 CTP:
http://openxmldeveloper.org/articles/3241.aspx
Erika Ehrli's blog post has a great overview of this release of the SDK, with many related links to more info.
Watch for more information coming soon on Eric White's blog as well.

This is the final "go-live" Version 1, so you can deploy solutions that you build using this version.

Going forward, the next step for the SDK will be the CTP of Version 2 planned for this summer, as covered in the Open XML SDK roadmap. We'd love to have even more developers providing feedback on the CTPs through the Connect program; here are the steps for signing up:

Sign up and register on the Microsoft Connect site. (You will need a Windows Live ID, which you can get here if you don't already have one.)
Email your Live ID account name (not password :-)) to osdkhelp@microsoft.com.
The folks running the program will then send you an invitation to join with more information.

Open XML Developer Resources

In addition to the links above, don't forget about all of the great Open XML content on MSDN. These resources can help you get up to speed quickly on Open XML development topics:

XML in Office Developer Portal:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa905545.aspx
Open XML Formats Resource Center: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/bb265236.aspx

And if you're at TechEd this week in Orlando, come on by the Open XML booth, where we're giving away brand-new hot-off-the-presses Open XML developer posters, recently updated by Erika. We're in the building on International Drive with colossal clamshells above both ends ...

Open XML SDK session at TechEd

dmahugh — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 23:26:00 GMT

This afternoon at TechEd, Zeyad Rajabi demonstrated some of the ways developers can use the Open XML SDK to read and write Open XML documents.

He started with the basics, such as how to create a hello-world document (as shown on MSDN), then progressed to real-world scenarios such as a web site for creating customized sales contracts. That demo (attached) builds on the template that Tristan Davis created in his post on the Word team blog that first described how content controls work.

One cool thing in the attached demo is the button that creates 100 sales contracts at once, to demonstrate the level of performance you can get by creating Open XML documents with the SDK instead of automating the Office clients. On Zeyad's laptop it took about 1.5 seconds to create 100 documents.

Zeyad also showed off some of the upcoming functionality in Version 2 of the SDK, including a high-level API that provides simple access to the content of XML parts in an Open XML package. I'll post those samples when we start releasing CTPs of Version 2 this summer.

TechEd Orlando

dmahugh — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 23:15:00 GMT

If you're at TechEd in Orlando this week, come on by the Open XML booth to get a copy of the recently updated Open XML developer poster (thanks Erika!). I'll be here for TechEd/Developer and TechEd/IT Pro, so hope to see you here.

What's new with the Open XML SDK. Tomorrow at 1:00, Zeyad Rajabi will be doing a session on the Open XML SDK, showing off some of the new functionality that will be available in the next CTP (which will be released any day now) as well as a few other things coming in Version 2. It's session OFC08-TLC, in Green Interactive Theater 1, which is right next to the Open XML booth. Don't let the long title scare you off ("Content-Level Document Editing and Manipulation Using Open XML SDK" or some such thing), it's going to be a fast-paced overview of some very cool technology for Open XML developers.

I took some time off last week, so am a bit behind in blogging and email (OK, more than a "bit"), but here are a few Open XML links from the last week or so that I've found interesting ...

Embedding simple values in a schema-mapped document. Wouter Van Vugt continues his exploration of how the <customXml> tag can be used to add semantic markup to documents, this time walking through some code samples and creating a simple method that can update data values in a schema-mapped document.

Caroline Arms and Jon Udell. Few organizations are any more involved in document archival considerations than the Library of Congress. LOC's Caroline Arms was recently interviewed by Jon Udell, and it's a wide-ranging discussion of the issues and options for document storage. (FYI, Caroline was one of the most active participants in Ecma TC45, and attended the IS29500 BRM with the Ecma delegation.)

Thought-provoking posts. A few recent posts on Open XML-related topics have made for interesting reading ...

Rick Jelliffe: A standard with appeal!
Jesper Lund Stocholm: Only fools rush in
Dennis Hamilton: Reality is the model
Patrick Durusau: Appealing ISO/IEC 29500

That's all I have time for today, but more to come soon. We're having some great conversations with developers, so if you're here at TechEd come on down to the Open XML booth.

Open XML links for 05-19-2008

dmahugh — Mon, 19 May 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Open XML can help you skip school. I've covered in the past how ISVs, corporate developers, information workers, and public-sector decision makers can benefit from Open XML standardization, but my colleague Pranav Wagh has addressed a hitherto-ignored segment of the market with his "Open XML for primary school goers." On a more serious note, Pranav has posted some useful content recently on how to create a PPTX with the packaging API, and then how to merge selected slides into a PPTX.

Interop interviews in Information Week. Information Week has published a recent interview with Sam Ramji (Sr. Director, Platform Strategy) and Tom Robertson (GM, Standards/Interoperability) that covers various aspects of Microsoft's approach to interopability, standards, open source, and related topics.

Lost in translation. Rob Weir posted some performance tests for translation between document formats, prompting Jesper Lund Stocholm to exult "When Rob is right, he's right!" Both posts include interesting thoughts, and have prompted a good discussion of some of the core issues in translating between various document formats. On a related note, Sun announced recently the availability of version 1.2 of the Sun ODF plugin for Microsoft Office.

Is Jesper on a binge? Speaking of translation, I'm not sure how to interpret Jesper's latest post. It's written in Danish, and the only words I understand are beer and pilsner. Well, "alkoholisk" is a word I might be willing to guess at. Skal!

DAISY translator released

dmahugh — Fri, 09 May 2008 20:17:00 GMT

I was traveling on Tuesday/Wednesday this week and wasn't around when the news came out, but the DAISY translator plugin for Word and an update to the DAISY Pipeline were announced on Wednesday. Here are a few places to learn more about how it works and how it's being used ...

BLOGS:

Reed Shaffner: Save as DAISY is Launched and Publishing
Gray Knowlton: DAISY Translator Released!
Oliver Bell: OpenXML/DaisyXML Translator Now Available
Sheri McLeish (Forrester): Microsoft Unchains Content For The Blind With DAISY XML Word Add-In

PRESS COVERAGE:

Computerworld: Microsoft grows DAISY for blind computer users while Adobe wilts
Dr. Dobb's Journal: DAISY Suite Updated
Linux World: Microsoft to help disabled access Office documents
PC Magazine: Microsoft Improves Word for the Blind
Tech2.com: Microsoft Looks Out For The Disabled

LINKS:

DAISY Consortium: http://www.daisy.org/
DAISY translator plugin: http://daisymfc.sourceforge.net/#dl
DAISY Pipeline: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=208610

OpenOffice 3.0 beta can read docx/xslx/pptx formats

dmahugh — Fri, 09 May 2008 17:13:00 GMT

The beta code for OpenOffice 3.0 has been released, and it includes Open XML read support:

Behind the scenes, OpenOffice.org 3.0 will support the upcoming OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.2 standard, and is capable of opening files created with MS-Office 2007 or MS-Office 2008 for Mac OS X (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.). This is in addition to read and write support for the MS-Office binary file formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt, etc.).

Full text of the announcement: http://marketing.openoffice.org/3.0/announcementbeta.html

Open XML links for 05-05-2008

dmahugh — Mon, 05 May 2008 17:40:00 GMT

Library of Congress's standards activity. The Library of Congress has posted an overview of the work they've been doing to support the development of key open standards for digital content, including Office Open XML and PDF/A. I had the pleasure of working with LOC's Caroline Arms during the ISO/IEC standards process for Open XML, and she is a thorough and meticulous editor who continues to be one of the driving forces in the work of TC45. As the LOC announcement says regarding the Office Open XML standards process,

The need for long-term preservation and interoperability was a major issue driving the development of this new open standard. For any organization that is required to retain documents for future use, there was concern that older documents would become unusable as formats change. Customers also asked that valuable data within documents, such as accounting figures in spreadsheets, be efficiently accessible by other applications and not hidden in proprietary binary formats. The participation of the Library of Congress and the British Library made it possible to introduce the interests and experience of archives and libraries in digital preservation as part of the standardization discussions.

Creating Open XML documents from XML and database data. Hot on the heels of the recent upgrade to Altova's XML tools, Alexander Falk has published step-by-step instructions on how to use StyleVision to publish database data in a DOCX. He also notes that StyleVision's price has been reduced, so it's a good time to think about adding this flexible stylesheet design tool to your arsenal.

Office System Power Tools. Eric White tells how to use the Open XML Package Editor to explore and edit Open XML documents from within Visual Studio. This integrated tool can help .NET developers be more productive while writing code that manipulates Open XML documents.

What to do now. Rick Jelliffe has some thoughts on how ODF supporters can take productive steps to help improve ODF and Open XML now that both of them are ISO/IEC standards. He offers eight specific suggestions regarding how to contribute to various standards groups, and also observes that "if you were not interested in being constructive but in trying to frustrate yourself there are other things you could do," ending with these thoughts:

National and international standards bodies are highly aware that their activities and importance is tolerated and encouraged only because they create markets. The minute a national or international standards effort becomes a servant of some clique or cartel, to the exclusion of others, it loses its fundamental justification. (I say “effort” because a body may have thousands of efforts on the boil at any time.) For standards bodies, exclusive behaviour is a mortal sin; in comparison, too much inclusiveness (i.e. by having multiple standards where in a perfect world we could imagine having only one) is only a mild (and bearable) fault. (And, indeed, in most cases I consider support of plurality, to allow the market to choose, a positive virtue.)

ODF conformance testing. I posted last week about the work that Jesper Lund Stocholm and Alex Brown have been doing to test conformance of ODF documents created by various versions of OpenOffice. Now Rob Weir has joined in, with a post entitled "ODF Validation for Dummies" that questions the validity of Alex's test, prompting Alex to respond with "ODF validation for the cognoscenti".

I'll not try to paraphrase or summarize anyone's perspectives since it's a complex debate around the ID/IDREF/IDREFS semantics of XML 1.0 and whether it's a reasonable step to disable the checking of Relax NG DTD Compatibility constraints when validating ODF documents. But if you're interested in the details, be sure to read the comment threads on the posts linked in the paragraph above. Regardless of the specific details, I think it's great to see so many BRM participants (Alex, Jesper, Rob, and also Inigo Surguy and Jirka Kosek on the comments) discussing conformance issues publicly. This is technical blogging at its best, and I look forward to seeing where it leads.

ODF conformance tests

dmahugh — Thu, 01 May 2008 01:39:00 GMT

Spring is in the air, and many a young man's thoughts turn to the matter of ODF compliance. Well, perhaps not many, but at least two ...

Jesper Lund Stocholm has posted the results of some tests that he participated in last fall, working with vendors including IBM, Microsoft and Novell to test interoperability of Open XML and ODF implementations. They used a set of sample documents provided by Danish public-sector organizations as the basis for the tests.

Jesper's findings are listed in the table to the right, and he concludes

So should we demand that OOo not be used at all? Of course not, but we should keep the pressure on the OOo-team to fix their code ... just as we should with Microsoft and Microsoft Office.

Alex Brown has also tested ODF conformance, with a slightly different approach. He took part 4 of the ECMA-376 spec, converted it to a DOC, then used OpenOffice 2.4.0 to convert the DOC to an ODT. His conclusions:

For ISO/IEC 26300:2006 (ODF) in general, we can say that the standard itself has a defect which prevents any document claiming validity from being actually valid. Consequently, there are no XML documents in existence which are valid to ISO ODF.

Even if the schema is fixed, we can see that OpenOffice.org 2.4.0 does not produce valid XML documents. This is to be expected and is a mirror-case of what was found for MS Office 2007: while MS Office has not caught up with the ISO standard, OpenOffice has rather bypassed it (it aims at its consortium standard, just as MS Office does).

After seeing these tests, I can't help wondering: what software will they use in South Africa to create ODF documents?

Altova upgrades tools for Open XML developers

dmahugh — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 04:01:00 GMT

Altova has announced an upgrade to the Altova MissionKit bundle with several changes of interest to Open XML developers, including improved SpreadsheetML support in MapForce, larger files supported by XMLSpy, DOCX support in StyleVision, and differencing between Open XML documents in DiffDog.

Alexander Falk has the details on his blog.

Open XML links for 04-28-2008

dmahugh — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:01:00 GMT

Open XML SDK Class Diagram Explorer. Erika Ehrli has created a reference for Open XML developers that is also a great demo of the types of user interfaces that Silverlight enables. The Open XML FormatSDK Class Diagram Explorer uses Deep Zoom to enable intuitive browsing on a large hi-res image of the entire class diagram for the SDK.

SDK code samples. Julien Chable has posted simple code samples showing how to create a new word-processing document or replace a custom XML part using the latest release of the Open XML SDK. The descriptions are in French, but the code is in multicultural C#.

Publicizing your Open XML solution. Building the next great Open XML solution for Office users? We have several ways to help you get the word out. The OBA Central web site has info on how you can get your solution listed on the web site, get nominated into Metro (to work with Microsoft's DP&E group on upcoming Office technologies), and enroll in the Innovate on Office program.

Functional Programming Tutorial. Eric White has updated his popular tutorial on functional programming. If you're an experienced developer in an object-oriented language like C# or Java, this tutorial is a great place to start with the mind-bending concepts behind LINQ and other FP tools. The code samples use Open XML documents.

Do you know XML? And while you're polishing up your dev skills, might as well learn a little more about XML too. Ric Johnson has an XML test that includes some good food for thought. Try searching for each topic to learn more about it online. (For example.)

Updated RTF specification. Murray Sargent announced last week that an updated version of the RTF spec is now available for download here. As Murray notes on his blog, reading the math section of the RTF specification is a great way to learn about the Office math model.

Exploring ODF. Jesper Lund Stocholm is exploring the ODF format and how it compares and contrasts to the Open XML format. His last two posts have interesting info on how formulas and custom XML support (via XForms) are implemented.