The Liquidator : OBA

OBA – ECMA Open XML at the NZ Architect forums

Mark.Carroll — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 05:45:00 GMT

In the first week of March we ran a series of Architect forums on Office Business Applications (OBA ) architecture and some options for architects on how to tap into the ever increasingly open architecture of the Microsoft Office suite. A major part of this forum was the discussion and demonstration of actual ECMA Open/XML implementations and the benefits they have produced.

The demonstrations of ECMA Open/XML implementations by Intergen (James Newton-King on Textglow) and Quantate (Brendan Jones on their Risk Management system) were performed by the actual developers who described how they used the specification to code their solutions. So much for any assertions that the ECMA Open/XML specification is too complex to implement. That is unless of course Wellington New Zealand is an international enigma in this regard (both James and Brendan are Wellingtonians). Come to think of it certain residents of our fair (allbeit often windy) city did manage to do ‘Lord of the Rings’ from the ‘specification’ and as I recall a bunch of folk said that was impossible as well.

Anyway – I digress, fact is using specifications isn’t always the most expedient way to develop solutions and in the interests of re-use and moving forward I saw some excellent material come out this week on the Open XML SDK. There is now a Roadmap and a version 2 release due in May that will assist other organisations, developers and implementations perform the same sort of functional, leveraging implementations of ECMA Open XML like those of Intergen’s Textglow and Quantates Risk management software.

Additional details are available here : http://openxmldeveloper.org/archive/2008/03/13/OpenXMLSDK.aspx

Posters for download ; Call me shallow but ....

Mark.Carroll — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 06:46:00 GMT

I've always been a fan of wall posters of object models, architecture models, architecture principals and all sorts of other good stuff. Call me shallow but I believe that 90% of architecture is communication so here are some links to some of the better posters I've encountered lately for .NET 3.5 and Sharepoint;

- .NET 3.5 Commonly used types and namespaces , download here

- 2007 Office system - Developer Posters , download here

- Windows Server 2008 - Component poster , download here

'Using Java to crack Office 2007'

Mark.Carroll — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 13:16:00 GMT

This is the title of a very interesting article by Ted Neward . The title may sound a little bit like something you find down those dark alleys on the web where various exploits and vulnerabilities are discussed but this is actually a very clever article that describes the very real benefits of Office 2007’s use of the ECMA Open XML standard for storing office application files.

Some interesting comments from the author ....

“All in all, the Java/Office story was, to put it mildly, a pretty ugly situation. Java developers either put up with it, consoled themselves in a manner highly reminiscent of one of Aesop's Fables by saying that "Office sucks, anyway, why would anyone want to use it?", or simply told their Office-using customers that Java couldn't understand Office because of the Microsoft/Sun lawsuit. With Office 2007, Microsoft has, without a doubt, made a significant part of these problems "go away".

Even if you are not into Java this article is worth a read because it explains how programmers can use well known technologies including plain old XML parsers to read, modify and save Office 2007 files without having to resort to COM and other approaches.

The article can be viewed here.