Open XML Workshop

We had an Open XML workshop in Redmond last week. It was rather spur-of-the-moment, frankly: we planned it less than three weeks before it took place. But this workshop is about to be delivered in many locations worldwide, and we wanted a chance to go through the content for a few Microsoft employees, partners, customers, and others.  If you're interested in attending one of these workshops, watch my blog for information about scheduled events soon.

The workshop happened to coincide with the dates of the MVP Summit. Microsoft has so many events that it's hard to not overlap with something, but in this case the potential conflict turned into a big plus, because a few people who were in town for the MVP Summit  helped out with the workshop. Julien Chable (France MVPMSP) dropped in to show us his ever-growing Java API for Open XML, and Wouter Van Vugt (Netherlands MVP) gave a great session on how to use XSLT to transform business data from other formats into the Open XML schemas. Other guest sessions included Mauricio Ordonez covering how to call the .NET 3.0 packaging API from unmanaged C++, and a demonstration by Tristan Davis and Brian Jones of an internal use of Open XML for large-scale document management.

Since we had Wouter, Julien, and the leaders of Sonata's Open XML team (Datta and Sanjay) all in town at the same time, we got together for a few meetings with various combinations of people to discuss collaborations and projects we're working on together.  I also recorded three video interviews about Open XML development projects -- I'll post details here as soon as the videos are posted on Channel 9, which I hope to get done some time tomorrow.  I'm also looking into putting some more of the workshop content online in video form, so watch for that soon as well.

Here are a few bloggers at the evening social event last week:

I wanted to make each person's face clickable, but apparently Community Server doesn't support image maps in inline images (the <map> tag seems to get removed on save), so I'll do it the old-fashioned way and list everyone's names:

Doug Mahugh
Dennis Hamilton
Wouter Van Vugt
Kevin Boske
Julien Chable
Brian Jones
Art Leonard

Thanks to everyone involved -- it was a great learning experience for all of us.

Correction: Julien is an MSP (Microsoft Student Partner), but will be an MVP soon.