One of the best discoveries I made back in my Office XP development era was the Dsofile.exe tool. It's a handly little executable that allows you to get programmatic access to the document properies of an Office document (we ought to write a .NET version of it). This was great for Web apps (I wrote a ton) that sift through directories and pull doc properties into a Web page for lists, sorting, blah. This is because it is unwise (was then, and still is) to run Office apps on a Web server. They just were not designed to work that way. However, server-side code sometimes needs to work with docs in a superficial way, like through properties only.

With Word 2003, these doc properties (custom or built-in) are accessible in the XML file format. So, I can write a Web app that pulls the author or some other property and puts it in a list. We made samples like this publicly available. Like the dsofile utility, you can also use XML on the server to change the properties, but you can change the content as well- all without loading the app into memory on the server. It's a good thing.

 Rock thought for the day: One of my co-workers is going to dine with some rock stars tonight. That's fun. I have hung out with a lot of musicians, too. The trouble is that the interesting ones do not want to talk about all of the things that most people want to ask them about (touring, albums, etc., etc.). My questions are much simpler- maybe more mundane. I like to know where they have found good Thai food (outside of Thailand), if they follow the Tour de France, and whether their high school was like mine where the stalls in the boys' locker room had no doors- so answering the call of nature meant also fighting off towel snaps at the same time. Survival of the fittest were those adolescent years.