Looking for some good reading on Open XML?

Wow, can't believe it's been over a month since my last post. I've been pretty busy getting back into the Office 14 project, the recently released Open XML APIs, as well as the Office 2007 SP work (where we'll be introducing the ODF support). I haven't had as much time to stay on top of the blogosphere, and also haven't been able to write much myself. For folks interested in following along with interoperability and file formats in Office, I would suggest subscribing to Doug Mahugh's blog. He's a member of Ecma TC45, and has also recently joined the OASIS ODF committee.

Today Doug has a post discussing the updated binary format documentation that was recently released.

I'll definitely aim to continue this blog, but most likely the frequency of posts will be fairly low (maybe once a month?). In the mean time though, here are a few great blogs:

• Doug Mahugh – Doug is helping to take over a lot of the file format and standards related work I was doing. Doug has been involved with the Open XML work for a couple years now and definitely knows his stuff. I'll continue to work closely with Doug and will definitely follow his blog closely.
• Gray Knowlton – While Doug will talk from the standards and development point of view, Gray is focused on the Office products. Gray's blog discusses the resources and opportunities available to folks interested in building their own Office business applications. Open XML is just one of the tools available to developers building Office solutions, and Gray plans to discuss them all.
• Eric White – Eric is on the developer evangelism team and his blog is really the ultimate place to go for hands-on info about building solutions on .NET that take advantage of Open XML. He already has a huge collection of great tools and code snippets. You should definitely check it out if you haven't already.

-Brian

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 30, 2008
  Just a short comment on Outlook calendar.  I recently used Outlook 2007 for over 1 year and I was never comfortable with the Outlook calendar.  Compared to Outlook 2003, it seemed a huge step backward. Recently I had to re-format my computer and I re-installed Office 2003.  While I miss some of the features in 2007, getting my calendar back was great. In the new version, please return the calendar back to its old very functional self.

• Anonymous
  July 01, 2008
  Could you let us know if IS 29500 will be the default file format for Office 14 ? And if so will newly created Office documents be made to conform to the strict conformance specs ?

• Anonymous
  July 01, 2008
  Hey Mike, that's not my call but I'll pass it on to the Outlook folks. Personally, I love Outlook 2007 (calendar included) :-) hAl, Yeah, the ideal would be to make sure the files we output in Office 14 conform to the IS 29500 spec. Right now we're still waiting on the final version of the spec to be published, at which point we can start to talk about how to support it, as well as move into maintenance. -Brian

• Anonymous
  July 01, 2008
  Brian Jones mentioned on his blog yesterday that he’s going to be pretty focused on Office 14 going forward

• Anonymous
  July 01, 2008
  Welcome back.  It is good to take a short break once in a while and come back with a fresh mind.

• Anonymous
  July 02, 2008
  Thanks! :-)

• Anonymous
  July 02, 2008
  hi, will newly created Office documents be made to conform to the strict conformance specs ? thanks

• Anonymous
  July 02, 2008
  Another Office 14 question. Will you be launching a 64 bit version for Vista at least? Vista 64 bit is much faster then 32 bits versions of both Vista en XP but to take full advantage of this 64 versions of the software are needed.  

• Anonymous
  July 07, 2008
  brian: "Right now we're still waiting on the final version of the spec to be published, at which point we can start to talk about how to support it, as well as move into maintenance." Seeing as how it is being appealed, it may be quite a while before we have the final specs.