14 DAY TRIAL // Following the release of the first public development milestone of Office 2010, Microsoft has made available for download a new testing build of the Open XML SDK 2.0 for Microsoft Office. The December 2009 Community Technical Preview (CTP) of the software development kit is currently up for grabs from the Microsoft Download Center, and just as the previous CTP bits, is of course available for free. Developers looking to access the strongly typed part and content classes designed for usage with Open XML documents can do so via the latest CTP for Open XML SDK 2.0.
“Open XML is an open ECMA 376 standard and is also approved as the ISO/IEC 29500 standard that defines a set of XML schemas for representing spreadsheets, charts, presentations, and word processing documents. Microsoft Office Word 2007, Excel 2007, and PowerPoint 2007 all use Open XML as the default file format,” Microsoft revealed. “The Open XML file formats are useful for developers because they use an open standard and are based on well-known technologies: ZIP and XML.”
When building the Open XML SDK 2.0, Microsoft has used the System.IO.Packaging application programming interface (API) as a foundation. With the SDK, the company makes it possible for third-parties to manipulate Open XML documents. The .NET Framework Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) technology is also leveraged by the SDK when it comes down to making sure that XML content inside the parts of Open XML documents can benefit from strongly typed object access.
“The Open XML SDK 2.0 simplifies the task of manipulating Open XML packages and the underlying Open XML schema elements within a package. The Open XML Application Programming Interface (API) encapsulates many common tasks that developers perform on Open XML packages, so you can perform complex operations with just a few lines of code,” Microsoft added.
Open XML SDK 2.0 for Microsoft Office December 2009 Community Technical Preview (CTP) is available for download here.
Office 2010 Beta 14.0.4536.1000 is available for download here.