Open XML SDK 2.5 CTP for Microsoft Office Now Available

This week, Microsoft made available for download a Community Technology Preview of its Open XML SDK 2.5 for Microsoft Office, intended for feature evaluation purposes.

Built on top of the System.IO.Packaging API, the Open XML SDK 2.5 was designed to provide strongly typed part classes that enable manipulation of Open XML documents.

For those out of the loop, we should note that Open XML is used as the default file format in Microsoft Office Word 2007, Excel 2007, and PowerPoint 2007.

These file formats can prove very useful to developers, since they use an open standard and are based on already popular technologies, namely ZIP and XML.

“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 explains.

The new Open XML SDK 2.5 for Microsoft Office takes advantage of the .NET Framework Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) technology so as to offer strongly typed object access to the XML content in various parts of Open XML documents.

The SDK was also designed so as to deliver simplified manipulation of Open XML packages, as well as of the underlying Open XML schema elements within a package.

The available package includes the Open XML SDK v2.5 Productivity Tool for Office, along with documentation for the Open XML SDK v2.5.

The SDK comes with a series of features that should offer better productivity capabilities, while also offering faster learning when working with the SDK and Open XML files.

Among these, we can count the possibility to generate Open XML SDK 2.5 source code leveraging document content.

Other features include the option to “compare source and target Open XML documents to reveal differences and to generate source code to create the target from the source, validate documents, and display documentation for the Open XML SDK v2.5,” Microsoft explains.

Download Open XML SDK 2.5 CTP for Microsoft Office