LINQ in Action - THE LINQ book

A couple of weeks ago, I posted some code to use LINQ to query tables in an Excel spreadsheet.  Because you can query databases using LINQ to SQL, you can write code to query a database and do a join with data in an Excel spreadsheet.  This can enable some interesting scenarios – let’s say that you have a database that contains some sort ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Content controls are an effective way to add structure to word processing documents.  You can write a very small LINQ query to retrieve the contents of content controls.  This topic in Office Online provides more information on content controls. In an upcoming post, I’m going to show how you can write a small test harness to test code ...

This post presents a snippet of code to remove comments from an Open XML Wordprocessing document. Note: This post may be of interest to LINQ to XML developers, as it contains some information that helps you write queries that perform better.  In the case of very large documents, the approach described ...

This post presents some code to remove personal information from an Open XML word processing document. Note: this post contains interesting information for LINQ to XML developers even if you are not interested in removing personal information from a document.  It demonstrates some easy ways to write robust code in LINQ to XML that behaves ...