Open XML links for 12-20-2007

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Document Science CTO on Office and Open XML. My good friend Warren Wilbee recently interviewed Dr. Nasser Barghoutian, the CTO of Document Science, about how they develop applications on the Office platform. Podtech has posted a video of the interview, and Open XML is one of the key technologies in their Office integration strategy.

A different Open XML conversation every day. Oliver Bell discusses the different types of Open XML conversation taking place these days, depending on the participants (developers, standards experts) and the medium (in person, on blogs).

A really different Open XML conversation. If you've not seen this one, I'd recommend you save it for when you can pour your favorite beverage, put your feet up, and enjoy a combination of humor, intrigue, scandal, and document formats over on Jesper Lund Stocholm's blog. Film at 11!

Office Compatibility Pack: 20 million downloads. Given the size of the compatibility pack download, a whopping 26MB, I was pretty surprised to see the magnitude of the Office Compatibility Pack downloads to date, as report by Gray Knowlton today. Gray also discusses the reason it's a manual download and not pushed out as an automatic update, and points out that "It takes only one download by the IT desktop management team to prepare thousands of desktops with the compatibility pack," so the usage numbers for the compatibility pack are likely to be significantly higher than the download statistics indicate.

Comparing Microsoft's tools for Open XML developers. Eric White's "What is the Difference Between the System.IO.Packaging and Microsoft.Office.DocumentFormat.OpenXml.Packaging Namespaces?" is a great overview of how the packaging API and the SDK compare and contrast, with code samples that demonstrate the difference in their approaches. He has also continued his series on reusable classes for .NET-based Open XML developers with a handy SpreadsheetML class that includes nested Sheet, Row and Cell classes to provide a framework for maximizing developer productivity on spreadsheet-oriented projects.

Breaking in the new guy. Speaking of Eric, he sent me a link yesterday that made my day: Doug Mahugh and the new horse. Guys, you don't know the half of what I'm doing to reprogram Eric these days (or what he's doing to reprogram me). And if you'd just get around to sending us that $2500 reward, we could afford even more reprogramming, and then you could blog about that, too!