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I just posted the recording of the webinar that I did today showing a Word 2007 Add-in that creates WPF Flow Documents (using the FlowDocument class): https://www112.livemeeting.com/cc/microsoft/view?id=74SMQS Here's an example of where I've used it to...( Read More...
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One of the challenges with creating online documentation is readability, especially with long documents. Most of the time, we end up printing out documents instead of attempting to read them online. One we print them out we lose the ability to easily search for text, one of the great aspects of online documents. Creating a great online reading experience was one of the major goals with the WPF FlowDocument, a XAML element that can put into any WPF application as well as being natively hosted by Internet Explorer. To see an example of a FlowDocument, take a look at a whitepaper that I recently wrote on Silverlight and Web Analytics.
In their most basic form, FlowDocuments are XAML markup, similar in form to XHTML documents. In addition to HTML, FlowDocuments add automatic column flow, search, scaling, readability enhancements, and hyphenation. Indeed it would be conceivable to transform XHTML to FlowDocuments using XSLT, because both formats are XML. I started looking around and I couldn't find any tools for creating FlowDocuments, especially with the authoring tool that I use (in addition to Windows Live Writer), Microsoft Word. Wait! Can't I just transform the Word Open XML into the FlowDocument XAML using XSLT? I sure can. In a few hours, I built a sample Word 2007 Ribbon Add-in that transforms the Word Open XML (WordML) of any Word 2007 document into the FlowDocument XAML. I will be sharing the source code for this Office Business Application (OBA) solution as well.
On November 29th at 11:00 AM PDT, I will be presenting in a live Webinar on how I built this solution with Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2(Orcas). Here's what I'll cover:
- Show how to use Visual Studio 2008 to create Office 2007 (and 2003) Add-ins.
- Show how to use the new visual Ribbon Designer in Visual Studio 2008 to craft a ribbon interface for Word
- Show how to to use WPF windows within a Word 2007 Add-in
- Walk through the transformation code
- Demonstrate the FlowDocument format
If you are interested in coming to the webinar (it will be recorded if you cannot make it) please register here.
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As many of you might know, before I joined Microsoft this past Spring, I worked for Mindjet as an technical evangelist (one of my many titles) where I demonstrated the power of the MindManager Solution Platform through the Mindjet Labs. One of the coolest demonstrations that I built (with the help of Vivek Vishist, a star solutions engineer) was an integration with Microsoft Office Word 2007. This took advantage of Word 2007's Open XML file format and ribbon user interface to demonstrate a high-fidelity round-trip business scenario that wasn't possible with previous versions of Word. I have talked about it many times, both when I was at Mindjet and now that I'm at Microsoft. I think it's a great demo and really shows the power of MindManager and Word 2007 working together; I love showing it off!
The latest time where I presented the solution was at an Open XML workshop that was hosted by Mindjet in San Francisco. Microsoft got a full camera crew there to film the workshop and I was able to talk about it at length (about 13 minutes). It might be a bit hard to follow - I jump around way too much - but take a look tell me what you think.
Links:
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One of our partners has some pretty cool technology for using MindManager to understand the main themes in a document. As part of my need to understand the Open XML file format , I used the MindSystems ThemeReader to extract the main themes from a 166 Read More...
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On the Mindjet Labs MindManager Jobs Forum , Dennis Günnewig posted a query about building an Open Document Format (ODF) export plug-in for MindManager. A few other people have been asking me about ODF and someone on the MindManagerDev Yahoo group Read More...
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On Tuesday, January 30, Don Campbell from Microsoft and I will be giving a free technical webinar on how the Word 2007 Map Editor for Mindjet MindManager works. Here's the description: Join Don Campbell, Technical Evangelist for Microsoft, and Michael Read More...
