Office file manipulation used to be difficult, but since Office 2007, Word, Excel and Powerpoint files can be read and written without anything more complicated than the native JDK itself because Office 2007 documents are now nothing more than ZIP files of XML documents. Ted Neward demonstrates this in action.
OpenXML SDK 2.0 for MS Office provides strongly typed part classes to manipulate Open XML documents. WorddocGenerator, an open source utility for generating template driven word files is one example of what can be done with this SDK. InfoQ got in touch with Atul Verma the developer of this utility to ask him a few questions about this project.
The Office Integration Pack enables Visual Studio LightSwitch developers to work with data in Microsoft Office 2010. With this extension, users are able to create documents, spreadsheets, and PDFs; send Outlook appointments and emails; and move data to and from Excel.
Three months ago Microsoft released the Outlook PST Specification documentation allowing developers to create server/desktop applications processing PST content without having to install Outlook. On May 24th, Microsoft announced two new open source projects, PST Data Structure View Tool and PST File Format SDK, making the creation of such applications even easier.
Microsoft has published the Outlook PST file format specification in order to "facilitate interoperability and enable customers and vendors to access the data in .pst files on a variety of platforms" as promised in October last year.
Visual Basic for Applications is a dead-end and Visual Studio for Applications isn’t ready for prime time, leaving developers in the uncomfortable position of trying to mix .NET code with legacy VBA macros. Fortunately Visual Studio Tools for Office makes it relatively painless.
There is a client platform that's already present on nearly every user's desktop, one which provides an amazing amount of power and flexibility in its user interface options, and provides a familiar user-interactive style that undergoes intensive study with every release. Ted Neward introduces the Microsoft Office platform as a rich client technology with examples of Excel - Java integration.
The Java vs. NET war is over. In this article, Ted Neward looks at how we can leverage the strengths of each together, such as using Microsoft Office to act as a "rich client" to a Java middle-tier service, or building a Windows Presentation Foundation GUI on top of Java POJOs, or even how to execute Java Enterprise/J2EE functionality from within a Windows Workflow host.
Ted Neward talks about various ways Java and .NET can be used together focusing on examples of MS Office automation, and explains how various interop approaches (in-proc, messaging, web services) work and when to use them.
