Kevin Boske - VSTA : Office Open XML Development

OpenXML Package Editor RTW with VSTO Powertools!

KevinBoske — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 00:21:00 GMT

Back when we were working heavily on the OpenXML file format developer tools, many of us were using zip and Notepad to edit the OpenXML files. Tom Underhill from the Office graphics team made all our lives easier with a VS package for editing OpenXML files. I used it quite a bit during the OpenXML code snippet development (you might have even seen a quick glipse of it in a demo somewhere). There are other Package file editors available, (like Wouter's), but I like this one mainly because its integrated in VS. (Where I spend much of my time these days).

Andrew Whitechapel and the VSTO folks got a shipping vehicle for Tom's OpenXML Package Editor. Along with a number of other VSTO and VSTA Powertools, the VS-integrated Package editor is available here.

Here's a list of features you'll find in the VSTO Powertool Package Editor:

Ability to open any package file via Visual Studio 2008
Navigate package and Relationship structure
Get properties on Parts and Relationships
Read and write XML within parts
Add and delete Parts and Relationships

Andrew has all the details on his blog.

Open XML API CTP Released!

KevinBoske — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 02:47:00 GMT

I've been quiet on the blog these past few months. I've been juggling work, a new baby (and a toddler) and some remodel plans, so extra-curricular activities like blogging have taken a back seat.

But today at TechEd 2007, we released a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of a managed-code Open XML API for use with .NET Framework 3.0!

Art Leonard and I began working on this at the 2005 PDC. He and I spent some late nights at a coffee shop in Seattle, spec'ing and prototyping the project over the past year or so. I met with a few customers to get an idea of just which scenarios are necessary. Most of this happened in the gaps of our regular work of shipping Office System 2007.

We learned a lot about working with Open XML file via the Packaging API while working with Ken Getz building the code snippets last year. With this API, we want to reduce the number of lines of code that are required to perform simple Open XML tasks, such as;

Locating the part you want
Replacing, adding or deleting parts
Accessing the XML within parts (using your choice of XML editor)

The API does this by abstracting the Packaging API and by strongly typing the individual parts of the Open XML file. By exposing parts of the package s strongly-typed objects, searching for and discovering those parts will require less code.

All of the structure of the Open XML file is exposed, so you can quickly move from one part to the next within the graph and discover the part you need.

Take the WDDeleteComments() snippet. In it, we have to walk through the graph, starting at the package, find the main document part, then find the comments part, delete it and the relationships to it from the main document part:

// Get the main document part (document.xml).

foreach (System.IO.Packaging.PackageRelationship relationship in wdPackage.GetRelationshipsByType(documentRelationshipType))

{

documentUri = PackUriHelper.ResolvePartUri(new Uri("/", UriKind.Relative), relationship.TargetUri);

documentPart = wdPackage.GetPart(documentUri);

// There is only one document.

break;

}

// Delete the comments relationship. There can only be one of these.

foreach (System.IO.Packaging.PackageRelationship relationship in documentPart.GetRelationshipsByType(commentRelationshipType))

{

Uri commentUri = PackUriHelper.ResolvePartUri(documentUri, relationship.TargetUri);

PackagePart commentsPart = wdPackage.GetPart(commentUri);

documentPart.DeleteRelationship(relationship.Id);

wdPackage.DeletePart(commentUri);

// There is only one comments part.

break;

}

…

But with the new API, the same code is reduced to this:

using (WordprocessingDocument wordDoc = WordprocessingDocument.Open(docName, true))

{

MainDocumentPart mainPart = wordDoc.MainDocumentPart;

mainPart.DeletePart(mainPart.CommentsPart);

}

As in the snippet, you still need to go through the XML of the MainDocumentPart and remove the references to the Comments part, but I think you'll find that working with the package structure of Open XML files much is much easier.

Our goal with this CTP is to get some feedback on our work to improve the way you code solutions with Open XML using .NET. I hope you'll download it and start playing. There is a forum on MSDN for feedback.

OpenXML Meetup

KevinBoske — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 21:24:00 GMT

Doug has posted some pictures of a meetup we had last week with the OpenXML developers group:

http://www.mahugh.com/images/blog/2007/03/15/openxmldevelopers.jpg

That's me, in the back, to the left of Brian Jones (The) trying to be seen over some of the guys from Sonata. It was really fun to meet everyone and put a face to the names. I'm going to try to get back to posting at least once a week, and I promise to add some substance to my posts.

Open XML Code Snippets on Channel 9 - UPDATE

KevinBoske — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 19:24:00 GMT

I recorded a screencast for Channel9 last week in which I walk you through a few of the code snippets we shipped for working with Office Open XML files using .NET 3.0. I take you through three snippets:

1. How to find the officeDocument part, or "start part" - This snippet is particularly useful. The officeDocument part is related from the package and represents the start of the tree of parts (graph, really) that represents the Office document. Once you've found this part, you can start working through the relationships and parts to find what you need. This is the only snippet that works with all three file types (documents, workbooks and presentations).

2. Document data redaction - With this snippet I show you how to remove a VBA project part from a Word Document, and convert the document from a Macro-Enabled Word Document to a Macro-Free Word Document.

3. Finally, I show how to insert a string value into a Workbook. This is particularly handy as Open XML workbooks store the strings in a shared string table part, seperate from the individual sheets.

There are forty snippets altogether, and I'll spend some more time in this blog discussing them in depth.

UPDATE: We got the screencast posted late today. Sorry about the inconvience. Doug was out when we noticed the bad link. His email had an OOF message pointing to another person, who had an OOF message that pointed to another person, who..... By the time I got through all the cascading OOF's, Doug had arrived at his destination and updated the link. Thanks Doug!

Open XML File Format Snippets RTW!

KevinBoske — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 01:17:00 GMT

We've released the final version of the code snippets I told you about back in June. These are the same snippets, updated with the final schemas and namespaces that we used in the shipping version of 2007 Office System. There are 40 scenarios that enable you to write code in VB.NET and C# to access and edit Open XML files without the Office client applications.

You will want to uninstall the Beta snippets before installing these. They are licensed for you to reuse in your own applications however you see fit.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=8d46c01f-e3f6-4069-869d-90b8b096b556&displaylang=en

Happy Coding

(almost) Everything Shipped!

KevinBoske — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 20:24:26 GMT

Okay, I've been out for a couple of days, taking some time after shipping Office 2007 and getting ready for another product delivery (our second child, a girl, due anytime).

While I was busy getting baby stuff out of storage, the rest of the company kept busy shipping great products for 2007. Here's the rollup with links of everything that came out over the past couple of days:

Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Second Edition

VSTO 2005 SE is a fully-supported free add-on to Visual Studio 2005 that enables developers to build applications on the 2007 Office System. This is really great, the folks in VSTO stepped up and got this Second Edition out just in time for Office 2007. Here are some highlights of the functionality:

Application-level add-in support for the most popular 2007 Office System applications including Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, InfoPath and Visio, and provides safe loading/unloading and easy management of managed add-ins.
Design-time and runtime support for key 2007 Office System features such as the Ribbon, Custom Task Panes, and Outlook forms regions.
NOTE: There are no visual designers for these features in this release.
Design-time support for InfoPath 2007 form templates
Maintainability and compatibility assurances. VSTO 2005 SE ensures that the applications customers have built on Office 2003 with VSTO 2005 continue to run with 2007 Office system.
The ability to run in Visual Studio 2005 Professional.
Expanded application-level add-in support for these Office 2003 Standard and Professional applications: Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Visio.
VSTO 2005 SE Setup allows you to install VSTO 2005 SE on Microsoft Vista.

Go get it and start building some great CTP solutions!

.NET Framework 3.0

In this released build of .NET 3.0, you will find the System.IO.Packaging namespace in the windowsbase.dll assembly. This is Microsoft's offering to enable developers to write applications against the Office Open XML file formats.

Windows Vista

Yes, you heard it right, Vista has shipped, it's finally here.

Programmatically opening & saving the new default file formats in previous versions of Office

KevinBoske — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 19:42:20 GMT

Matt Scott, of the Word Team, has a great post on The Microsoft Office Word Team's Blog : Programmatically opening & saving the new default file formats in previous versions of Office. He's posted a piece of code to make it easier for you to save to the Open XML file formats from the previous versions of Excel and Word. (No support for saving to Open XML from the OM in PowerPoint 2000, XP or 2003).

The ActiveX in Office Open XML Compendium - Part 1 Persistence

KevinBoske — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 20:54:00 GMT

Vijayeta Tilak has been posting a lot of info lately on the OpenXMLDeveloper site and posted this about ActiveX in OpenXML.

Its a good post, but there's a bit more to the story, and I've been meaning to post the details on ActiveX control support in Office Open XML and the changes to controls in Office 2007. A good place to start is SamRad's posts on the Trust Center in Excel.

Persistence

Previous versions of Office only supported the following interfaces for ActiveX control persistence (IPersistStorage, IPersistStream, IPersistStreamInit and IPersistPropertyBag for saving to HTML). In order to store ActiveX control properties as XML, we added support for IPersistPropertyBag for the regular save cases (for controls that support this interface).

If the control doesn't support IPersistPropertyBag, the application will attempt to save the properties using the next interface on its list (see below). (We simply added IPeristPropertyBag to the top of the list from previous versions).

Word and PowerPoint:

IPersistPropertyBag()
IPersistStorage()
IPersistStreamInit()
IPersistStream()

Excel:

IPersistPropertyBag()
IPersistStreamInit()
IPersistStream()
IPersistStorage()

For controls that persist using the IPersistPropertyBag() interface, the control properties are stored in a single xml part with a relationship type of http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocument/2006/relationships/control and a content type of application/vnd.ms-office.activeX+xml.

Control properties that are stored using one of the other interfaces will be stored in a binary part that is related to the XML part by the following relationship: http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/2006/relationships/activeXControlBinary and a content type of application/vnd.ms-office.activeX.

Of course, the schema is described in the Ecma spec.

Next Post: MetaFiles and disabled controls

- Kevin

Open XML Code Snippets Live!

KevinBoske — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 20:00:00 GMT

Yesterday our folks at Office Online released the first set of the Open XML Code Snippets to the web. These snippets work with Visual Studio.NET 2005 and are written in C# and VB.NET using the WinFX (oops) .NET 3.0 System.IO.Packaging API.

When we started working on these, I had a list of over 150 scenarios to choose from, but I had to narrow it down, so I focused on scenarios that would help you learn some of the patterns for working with the Open XML Formats but would aslo be resuable in your solutions. For example, we have snippets for removing parts (Sheets, Slides, Comments, VBA projects). Removing parts is definately a common scenario.

There's snippets for editing data, like accepting comments by a particular user. This one is useful as you must not only know the parts to find (Comments) but also must work with the XML in the document.

There are snippets specicially for each application's files. We've got snippets for editing data in a cell. We've got a snippet for reording slides in a presentation. We've got a snippet for adding RibbonX customizations. There are over 40 in all.

All the snippets were written in both VB.NET and C# by Ken Getz. Ken did a great job. Everytime we made a change to the file format, Ken would update the snippets. (Of course, we kept improving the file format faster than I could keep up with shipping the snippets).

So, here they are, in Beta 2 format. Please download them and give them a try. I think Doug has some more notes over on OpenXMLDeveloper about these.

I'm out on vacation, posting this from my parents old machine (part of my vacation is to setup their new machine), but I will check the blog periodically. Please report any issues, comments or praise you have for the snippets in the comments of this post.

Ecma Draft Available!

KevinBoske — Fri, 19 May 2006 05:37:00 GMT

I've been a lazy blogger lately. We're all heads down shipping Beta2 of Office 2007, and I've been working on the Office Open XML Validator design and code snippets. The code snippets are going through the process for shipping them a little after Beta2.

But the big news of the day is that Ecma has completed another draft of the Open XML format spec. Brian's got all the whole story on his blog. For those looking to get straight to work developing, go to the Ecma site, the schemas are downloadable from the bottom of the page.

I promise to post very soon a detailed description of a solution we're deploying internally here at Microsoft on Beta2, using SharePoint Portal Services V3, Office Open XML Word Documents and WinFX System.IO.Packaging.

- Kevin

Tools for working with Office Open XML files

KevinBoske — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 01:11:00 GMT

I've been asked if we are planning to release tools to help developers work with the new Office Open XML files. So I thought I'd run down what we currently have planned.

Beta 2 Code Snippets

At Office 2007 Beta2 we will have ~50 VS 2005 code snippets for working with Office Open XML files. These snippets are written in both C# and VB.NET and are very similar to the snippets in my previous posts. Each snippet is a function that you can use in your own app development. In the meantime, keep looking here for more examples of how to use WinFX to work with the files.

File Validation Library

We are working on a libary that developers can use at either run-time or design time to validate that a given Open XML file matches both the structure (all the parts, with the right relationships and right content types) and schemas (validating the XML against the XSD). This will ship sometime after Office 2007. Stay tuned for details on this.

Open XML Serializer / Deserializer Library

We expect that it will take some time current applications to be converted to work with the Open XML files which are Zip. In order to assist during this transition, we are building a serializer/desrialier which will take an Open XML Package and serialize it from Zip to a flat XML representation.

This is, at least the list we are committed to right now.

- Kevin

OpenXMLDeveloper.org is Live!

KevinBoske — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 19:39:00 GMT

Bill just announced the OpenXMLDeveloper.org community live at the Office Developer Conference a few minutes ago. We already have a bunch of members to the community and we hope all of you will come and join.

This is a great chance to be a founding member of a new developer community.

Brian and I sat down with a couple of the guys who run the site and the camera from Channel9 last week to talk about some of the scenarios you can use the Open XML formats and some of the tools we have planned. That video should be up sometime today.

I hope to see you all at OpenXMLDeveloper.org.

Kevin Boske - VSTA : Office Open XML Development

OpenXML Package Editor RTW with VSTO Powertools!

Open XML API CTP Released!

OpenXML Meetup

Open XML Code Snippets on Channel 9 - UPDATE

Open XML File Format Snippets RTW!

(almost) Everything Shipped!

Programmatically opening &amp; saving the new default file formats in previous versions of Office

The ActiveX in Office Open XML Compendium - Part 1 Persistence

Persistence

Word and PowerPoint:

Excel:

Next Post: MetaFiles and disabled controls

Open XML Code Snippets Live!

Ecma Draft Available!

Tools for working with Office Open XML files

OpenXMLDeveloper.org is Live!

Programmatically opening & saving the new default file formats in previous versions of Office