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• A Great Early Silverlight 2 Showcase: TextGlow

  We're already starting to see some cool samples that use Silverlight 2 really effectively. Prior to MIX, we had a small private beta running to get some early feedback on the builds that we were producing, and a few folk made really good use of this time to build some interesting ideas out. This one is one of my favorites: TextGlow is a Silverlight 2 application that reads Word .docx files. The Open XML format is an ECMA-ratified standard, and having a web-based runtime with the power Silverlight makes it possible to accomplish something that I don't think you could do easily with any other technology. TextGlow downloads Word documents asynchronously, opens them as ZIP files, parses them with LINQ-to-XML and then renders them using the WPF-based text and graphics APIs. This is a big deal, and not just because it's a cool Silverlight sample. In years gone by, if you wanted to share a document on the web, you'd typically have converted it to PDF format (assuming you had the full version of Read More... Posted Thursday, March 06, 2008 12:40 PM from Tim Sneath | 0 Comments Filed under: OOXML, Sample, silverlight, silverlight 2.0, mix08, office

• Open Standards, not Open Source

  Miguel has a very insightful post on the OOXML v/s ODF meme. He says: Open standards and the need for public access to information was a strong message. This became a key component of promoting open office, and open source software. This posed two problems: First, those promoting open standards did not stress the importance of having a fully open source implementation of an office suite. Second, it assumed that Microsoft would stand still and would not react to this new change in the market. And that is where the strategy to promote the open source office suite is running into problems. Microsoft did not stand still. It reacted to this new requirement by creating a file format of its own, the OOXML. It is amusing to see the reactions of people who shouted from rooftops that Microsoft wasn't open or wasn't transparent, now that Microsoft is doing something to remedy that. The shrill voices that said "we do not have enough information on Microsoft's proprietary protocols to interoperate well" Read More... Posted Thursday, February 08, 2007 11:44 PM from Even a chimp can write code | 0 Comments Filed under: OOXML, ODF