14 DAY TRIAL // The December 2009 Community Technical Preview (CTP) of the Open XML SDK 2.0 for Microsoft Office has been up for grabs from the Microsoft Download Center, since the past week, and continues to be available even at this point in time. When it first released the latest CTP build of its software development kit for Office, the Redmond company delivered only scarce details about what the release brings to the table for developers. Zeyad Rajabi, an Open XML document format program manager, has since then corrected this.
Rajabi reveals that Microsoft has based the December 2009 CTP of Open XML SDK 2.0 for Microsoft Office on four major improvements. With the latest development milestone, the SDK now fully supports Office 2010 Open XML formats. In addition, the evolution in tone with the release of Office 2010 Beta, also introduces “Office 2010 schema and semantic level validation; general improvements based on a recent Open XML SDK usability study andOpen XML SDK tools improvements,” Rajabi explained.
The Open XML SDK December 2009 CTP enables devs not just to create, but also edit, and consume Office generated Open XML formats. These actions are valid whether Office 2007 or Office 2010 are involved. Of course, early adopters are bound to start test driving the SDK in the context of the Office 2010 Beta release.
“The Open XML Packaging API component allows you to add/remove parts within an Open XML package. This component functions by providing you strongly typed classes for every part within a package. In Office 2010 we've added new parts to the package in order to support some of our new features. With this CTP you are able to deal with these new parts with classes,” Rajabi said.
Office 2010 Schema and Semantic Level Validation improvements in the latest CTP of the SDK now allow for a clear differentiation between Office 2007 or Office 2010 error. Developers will be able to notice that the validation functionality has been transitioned to its own namespace reference. It is because it has its own namespace, that the feature is more discoverable. In addition, Microsoft has added the FileFormatVersions enumeration to the OpenXmlValidator class. In this manner, devs can specify whether they target Office 2007 or Office 2010.
“General Open XML SDK Improvements - Advanced open settings are now part of a new class called OpenSettings. This class allows you to pre-process documents according to markup compatibility, auto save files, or caps the open method to deal with a specific number of characters within a part. Hopefully this change will make it easier to deal with the Open method,” Rajabi added.
Document Reflector, Open XML Class Explorer and Open XML Diff are the three new tools that were offered in the August 2009 CTP of Open XML SDK. Microsoft has since then consolidated the Open XML SDK Tool into a standalone download. “The new tool adds the following functionality: Documentation for Office 2010 Open XML formats; Validation functionality. This feature allows you to validate Open XML files according to Office 2007 or Office 2010; New reflection feature that combines reflection with the Open XML Diff feature. This new feature allows you to automatically generate SDK code that transforms one document into another document,” Rajabi explained.
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.