Open XML links for 02-25-2007

I'm back home after a week on the road, with lots of interesting work to finish up and an overflowing in-box to attend to. But first things first: I went through all my RSS feeds this evening, and here are a few items that may be of interest to Open XML developers ...

Digital Signatures

Wouter Van Vugt has a great post on how to work with digital signatures in Open XML. The basic concepts are simple: you can sign any list of parts or relationships in a document, and a document can contain any number of signatures.

The implementation, however, can get a bit more complex. Wouter explains the steps involved, and his post also includes a simple sample application with C# source code using the System.IO.Packaging API that's available in the .NET Framework 3.0.

CSS and Document Standards

Håkon Wium Lie, CEO of Opera (the browser publisher), has sounded off on document format standards in an editorial on Cnet. Perhaps not surprisingly, Lie thinks there is a CSS approach that would work better than either ODF or Open XML.

I'm a bit doubtful of that claim myself, but I did enjoy some of the comments on the Slashdot thread about Lie's editorial. And on a tangential note, I've found his CSS book so useful that I've bought two copies with my own money over the years since the first edition came out. (It's not a reference, it's a guided tour of the underlying philosophy of CSS -- if that's what you want, this is the book.)

OMPM Released

The Office Migration Planning Manager has been officially released, including the Office File Converter I blogged about recently here.