DII Workshop: MCE Deep Dive, Redmond

We’ll be hosting another DII workshop soon, and this one will be of special interest to those who want to understand the inner workings of MCE (Markup Compatibility and Extensibility) as defined in Part 3 of ISO/IEC 29500.  We’ve used MCE for new functionality in documents created by Office 2010, and members of SC34 WG4 have expressed interest in understanding the details of our implementation.  So we’re planning a workshop in Redmond on Friday, September 18, the day after the upcoming SC34 plenary in nearby Bellevue, to do a deep-dive review of how Office 2010 uses MCE.

For those who aren’t familiar with MCE, here’s how it is described in the Scope clause of the standard (ISO/IEC 29500-3):

This Part of ISO/IEC 29500 describes a set of conventions that are used by Office Open XML documents to clearly mark elements and attributes introduced by future versions or extensions of Office Open XML documents, while providing a method by which consumers can obtain a baseline version of the Office Open XML document (a version without extensions) for interoperability.

By using MCE for the new functionality in Office 2010, we can deliver innovations like sparklines in Excel 2010 or new slide transitions in PowerPoint 2010, while maintaining compatibility with the Open XML standard.  At this one-day event, members of the Word, Excel, PowerPoint and graphics teams will demonstrate these new capabilities and show how these new capabilities are stored in MCE alternate content blocks and extension lists.

The date for this workshop will be Friday, September 18, and the location will be Microsoft’s Redmond campus.  If you’re interested in attending, please contact my colleague Amruta Gulanikar via this form to get on the list.  Amruta can also provide information about travel and hotel options.

I hope to see you there!