OpenXML Developer : DrawingML

ECMA-376 and ODF1.1 Implementer notes for Office 2007 SP2 released

jenw — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 19:23:00 GMT

You may have seen that the implementer notes for Office 2007 SP2 for ECMA-376 and ODF1.1 are now available.

ECMA-376 Implementer Notes for Office 2007 SP2

On the ECMA-376 Implementer Notes Site you will find detailed information about Office’s support for the ECMA-376 specification. These notes will help ECMA-376 implementers interoperate with Office by explaining, among other things, Office’s support for optional features, range restrictions for attribute values, and how Office’s functionality maps to Open XML constructs.

ODF 1.1 Implementer Notes for Office 2007 SP2

On the Open Document Format (ODF) implementer notes site you will find detailed information about Office’s support for each section of the OASIS ODF 1.1 specification. These notes will help promote interoperability by providing details that others can use as reference points for their own applications. For example, they include information about which attributes and elements are supported, as well as details about how Office functionality maps to specific constructs in the ODF specification. For a higher-level overview of Microsoft’s general approach to ODF implementation, see Guiding Principles for Office’s ODF Implementation.

Open XML SDK V2 CTP available

ecullins — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 19:27:00 GMT

Open XML SDK V2. The first CTP of V2 of the Open XML SDK is now available for download.

This release includes a high-level DOM (document object model) for Open XML development, as well as several tools to streamline Open XML development:

The OpenXmlDiff utility identifies differences in the markup in two Open XML documents.
The Open XML Class Explorer helps you determine which strongly typed class to use for a specific task, and includes the text of the relevant section of the ECMA-376 spec for each class.
The Open XML Document Reflector takes a target document as input, and with a few clicks it shows you the C# code needed to generate that document (or a section of it) with the Open XML SDK.

See Eric White's blog post for more details.

Microsoft announces Open XML SDK roadmap

dmahugh — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 20:08:00 GMT

Microsoft unveiled today the roadmap for the Open XML SDK that was released last June as a CTP (Community Technology Preview) version. After collecting developer feedback through the CTP release, they've put together a two-phased release plan to get developers a released version of the API quickly (May of this year) and then build on that with additional functionality for a final version in the Office 14 timeframe.

Links to resources for this article:

The Open XML API will be released in two versions. Version 1.0 will include an updated version of the CTP that was released in June 2007, to be released in April 2008 with a final release of Version 1.0 in May 2008. Version 2.0 will be available as a CTP version this summer, and the final release will be part of the Office 14 wave of products and technologies. (Office "14" is the next major release of Microsoft Office.)

Both versions will be free downloads on MSDN, available at the Open XML SDK page. Version 1.0 will include the following functionality:

Strongly typed access to parts within Open XML documents (a few typical examples: classes for the main body part or style part of a word-processing document, the workbook and worksheet parts in a spreadsheet document, or the presentation and slide parts in a presentation document)
Simple access to the parts within an Open XML document, relative to other existing APIs (example: one line of code to retrieve or replace a part)
“Linq-friendly” annotation capabilities, to allow developers to use the SDK with emerging Linq to XML technology (Eric White's blog has a code sample demonstrating this capability)
Consistency and naming changes per feedback from the developer community since the June 2007 CTP version, including adherence to .NET naming conventions
The May 2008 RTW (released to web) version will be ready to go live, and developers can build shipping products on it

Version 2.0 will add the following capabilities:

Content object model including additional classes and methods for simplifying developer work within parts (example: methods for retrieving or modifying a specific paragraph, style, cell, or shape within a part)
Search functionality, for simple searching of content in all document types
Validation functionality, to verify that modified or created documents are compliant with the Open XML standard
High-level “scenario-based” functionality (examples: creating a document from a template, accepting all revisions in a document)
Shared ML functionality (example: classes for DrawingML chart parts and other parts that can appear in multiple document types)

The functionality in this roadmap was driven by feedback received from developers since the CTP release last June. A recurring theme was that developers want more tools to help edit and manipulate the underlying XML within the parts, and this is reflected in new methods that will be included in the content object model, as well as Linq-related changes as mentioned above.

For more detailed information about what's coming in the Open XML SDK, see Jean-Christophe Cimetiere's video interview with Zeyad Rajabi and Eric White where they discuss the changes in the SDK and show some of the details of how it will work.

To download the latest version of the SDK or for links to more information, see the Open XML SDK page on MSDN.

Developer workshop videos

dmahugh — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 16:04:00 GMT

MSDN has published a comprehensive set of videos of a 2-day Open XML developer workshop. These videos cover the content that was posted on OpenXMLDeveloper recently here.

The instructors for this workshop were Doug Mahugh of Microsoft and Chris Predeek of the Ted Pattison Group, and the workshop was sponsored by Mindjet and took place at their office in San Francisco on June 18-19, 2007.

UPDATED: Accessibility of Open XML

Gray_Knowlton — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 13:37:00 GMT

Open XML Formats support accessibility in a number of ways. In explaining this support to its customers, partners and assistive technology vendors, Microsoft has created a preliminary draft report describing how Open XML compares to W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and W3C XML Accessibility guidelines....(read more)