LINQ in Action - THE LINQ book

I recently posted some code that allows you to use LINQ to query Excel tables.  The source for these queries is the Open XML document – you don’t need to involve the Excel application to query the data in these tables.  In that post, I presented a few examples of queries of various types.  This post shows a join of two ...

[Blog Map] Excel has a very cool feature where you can declare that a range of cells is a table.  It is a feature that allows you to use Excel very much like a database.  You can add new rows as necessary, sort the table by columns, do some simple filtering, calculate the sum of columns, and more.  Each table has a unique table ...

[Blog Map]  A convenient way to explore Open XML markup is to create a small document, modify the document slightly in the Word user interface, save it, and then compare it with the Open XML Diff utility that comes with the Open XML SDK V2.  However, Word adds extraneous elements and attributes that enable merging of two documents that ...

I’ll be presenting two sessions on the Open XML SDK at Tech Ed 2008 EMEA in Barcelona. OFC206 - Open XML SDK Version 2 Overview and Architecture (November 12, 13:30 - 14:45) In this session, I’ll present an overview of V2 of the Open XML SDK.  I’ll talk a bit about the architecture of the Open XML formats.  I’ll then compare and ...

[Blog Map]  Merging multiple word processing documents into a single document is something that many people want to do.  An application built for attorneys might assemble selected standard clauses into a contract.  An application built for book publishers can assemble chapters of a book into a single document.  This post ...

Data-bound content controls are a powerful and convenient way to separate the semantic business data from the markup of an Open XML document.  After binding content controls to custom XML, you can query the document for the business data by looking in the custom XML part rather than examining the markup.  Querying custom XML is much ...

You can build very powerful document assembly solutions using the Open XML SDK V2 literally in just a few minutes.  In our presentation at PDC 2008, amongst other demos, Zeyad Rajabi and I will demonstrate this in a live coding session.  We'll be using the LINQ friendly features of the SDK.  It really is a quite a remarkable set of ...

When I was writing the LINQ to XML documentation, Ralf Lämmel was the program manager for LINQ to XSD, an incubation project in the data programmability group at Microsoft.  Ralf really helped me a lot in those days, both with questions on LINQ to XML, and questions around functional programming.  It was in email exchanges ...

Many types of documents contain code, including API documentation, tutorials, specifications, technical books, and magazine articles.  Too often, there is no way to automate testing and validation of this code.  This post presents a small example program that shows how to use content controls in Open XML word documents to delineate code ...

Today, the development team for the Open XML SDK has announced that they have released the first Community Technology Preview (CTP) of version 2 of the Open XML SDK.  Download it at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=127912.  There is a lot of very cool stuff in this release, including: Strongly typed document object model ...