Miscellaneous links for Halloween

Stephen McGibbon has screenshots of the Open XML and ODF support coming in Windows 7 Wordpad, as announced by Steve Sinofsky at PDC this week.

Alex Brown has predicted that 2009 will be a boring year for document formats, while covering some of the details of the DII workshop last week. See Rick Jelliffe's fake real-time blog of the event for some additional perspective on document archtetypes.

The big news in WG4 is that Jesper Lund Stocholm will be participating in WG4 as a technical expert from the Danish SC34 mirror. It's good to see that management at CIBER is willing to share his talents for this work, and he'll be a great addition to the working group. Jesper has also posted some interesting thoughts on the possible implications of Office's support of ODF.

The Word Team Blog has another "behind the curtains" post covering the interactions between styles, document defaults, style sets and themes. This builds on Jonathan's previous post on order of operations for styles.

Ravindra Somayaji has posted some details of last week's M2 release of the Open XML / ODF Translator project.

Eric White continues to blog up a storm, and he has posted the demo files from Zeyad Rajabi's presentation at PDC. (These are the same demos Zeyad previewed at the DII workshop last week.) Eric also has some information about his upcoming presentations at TechEd/Barcelona, and other recent posts have covered altChunk for document assembly and how to create data-bound content controls with the Open XML SDK.

In addition to being Halloween, today is my fifth anniversary of having no hair. On Halloween 2003, I shaved my head and went to work dressed up as Buddha, primarily because I had picked up a saffron robe in Thailand and was reaching for an excuse to wear it. Whatever your disguise, Happy Halloween!