New Open XML Developer Center on MSDN
As most developers who work with Microsoft technologies know, there are Developer Centers on MSDN. Each developer center, run by a team devoted to the technology, contains the best resources for that technology, including links to SDK downloads, documentation, whitepapers, code samples on Code Gallery and CodePlex, bloggers and their posts, forums, and more. These developer centers are great resources, and should often be the first stop in your search for a solution to your developer challenges.
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Blog TOCI'm happy to announce that we've revamped our Open XML Developer Center. The new dev center is much better than the old one, including links to many more resources, blog posts, tools, screen-casts, visual How-To articles (articles with an accompanying screen-cast), and more. There are also some appearance changes, but most important is the list of content, assembled in one place, that can help you find what you need.
The most important feature of the new Open XML Developer Center is the navigation panel:
This is a complete list of all the pages in the Developer Center. That's it – 16 pages, so it's easy to navigate. (Some of them have a lot of material on them, so you'll need to scroll to see it all.)
Here's my quick summary of what's available:
- Downloads – download the Open XML SDK, Visual Studio Code Snippets, the Ecma Standard, and find links to Microsoft's implementation notes on Ecma-376 and IS29500.
- Learn Open XML – this page and and primarily the pages underneath (Getting Started, MSDN Articles, How Do I Videos, SDK, Training, Webcasts and Videos) give you what you need to get started, from very basic material to advanced topics.
- Scenarios – find information based on what you're trying to do.
- Technologies – find content based on whether you're working with word-processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, or Open XML in general.
I helped find the links for these pages, and I'm absolutely certain that I've missed some important ones, so please send me your links – both to your own blog posts, and to tools and products. We're happy to include links in these pages. We'll send folks your way! Use the EMAIL button on my blog, or add comments on this page. We can add links as often as every couple of weeks – this is going to be an active dev center!
While there's quite a bit here now, in the future, expect to see a lot more. Open XML is still a relatively new technology, and we know that there are places where we need to provide more examples and guidance for scenarios that we haven't addressed yet. With the release of the Open XML SDK 2.0 (which will be released in the same time frame as Office 2010), we'll be converting a lot of this content to use the SDK 2.0. We're writing new MSDN articles, CodePlex and Code Gallery samples, recording new screen-casts, and more. It's a fun time to be involved in document formats!
Special thanks to Verna Appel DeLuna<_st13a_personname><_st13a_personname><_st13a_personname><_st13a_personname>, who drove this effort! Also Frank Rice<_st13a_personname><_st13a_personname><_st13a_personname><_st13a_personname> and Erika Ehrli Cabral<_st13a_personname><_st13a_personname><_st13a_personname><_st13a_personname>! Great job!