Updated XSDs available for the Office Open XML formats

Some pretty cool news to report today:

XSDs for the Office Open XML formats working draft 1.4

The XSDs for the Office Open XML formats working draft 1.4 are now available. You can grab them from here: https://www.ecma-international.org/news/Ecma%20TC45%20WD1.4%20Final%20Schemas.zip

As you probably noticed, we published the 1.4 draft in both PDF and .docx. The .docx files were created using the 1.4 version of the draft, which means you should be able to validate those files using these newly published schemas. Here are the parts of the draft in .docx form:

If you are interested in learning everything about the formats, but don't want to get into the nitty gritty details that Part 4 contains, I would suggest reading Part 3 (the Primer). It's a great overview of the formats, and isn't nearly as large as part 4. Here's where you can get the PDF version of Part 4: https://www.ecma-international.org/news/TC45_current_work/tc45-2006-337.pdf

Last day in my 20's

I turn 30 tomorrow, and for the most part I was treating it as a non-event. After the Seahawk game on Sunday my wife told me that a friend of mine had called and asked if I wanted to meet up with him to go to the horse track (Emerald Downs). I said "sure: and headed down to pick him up and go over to the track for a few drinks and some gambling. He said some friends from work were having a party up in the club lounge and so we headed up there. The next thing I knew we walked into a suite and everyone was yelling "surprise!"

So, as only she could do, my wife pulled another one over on me. She had reserved a suite and invited all of our friends down for the day. We spent the rest of the afternoon and evening hanging out and watching the races, football games, etc. Pretty sweet day (and it made coming into work on Monday much more difficult than usual). Here's a picture of me and my wife in the suite (wearing my "30th birthday" medal):

She also had one of the races named after me. They called it "Old Man Brian", and I'm not sure if I agree with that yet. We also got to go down to the winner's circle for the race and get our picture taken with the winning horse. I should have brought my camera down for that, the horses were amazing.

Not sure how many folks are from the northwest, but the view from Emerald Downs was really great. It was my first time to the horse track, and with a view like this I'm sure we'll head back (even though I lost money on just about every race J):

Luna

I'm sorry this is turning into one of those blogs where I talk more about myself than about the actual technologies. I promise I'll cut out the sappy stuff, but I did want to post a picture of the new puppy that's resulted in a couple weeks now of no sleep (she's worth it):

-Brian