Microsoft Open Sources its Open XML SDK -- Visual Studio Magazine

Microsoft Open Sources its Open XML SDK

It's been made a project on Github.

By Keith Ward
06/25/2014

Microsoft has open sourced its Open XML SDK, which will be welcome news for Office developers.

The announcement was made by Doug Mahugh on the Microsoft Open Technologies Web site. He blogged that the project was put on Github under the Apache 2.0 license, and will be managed by Microsoft's .NET Foundation. The Open XML SDK has been available since 2007, and "provides developers with a set of strongly typed classes that make it easy to read, write and manipulate the parts and content in an Open XML document such as the DOCX, XLSX or PPTX files created by Microsoft Office," Mahugh wrote.

Foundational to the SDK is the System.IO.Packaging API. The Office Open XML File Formats is "an open, international, ECMA-376, Second Edition and ISO/IEC 29500 standard," according to Microsoft documentation accompanying the SDK.

A related post by Brian Jones of the Office Development Platform mentioned that the SDK is downloaded more than 10,000 times per month on average, and is especially popular in the health care and banking fields. A pie chart listed the most popular uses of the SDK. By far, the No. 1 use was for document generation (40 percent), followed by content manipulation (18 percent), data import/export (10 percent) and document assembly (8 percent).

The .NET Foundation, for managing the growing collection of Microsoft's .NET Framework technologies that are being open sourced, is a new organization; it was unveiled last April during Microsoft's Build conference. The highlight of that show was when the .NET Compiler Platform, formerly code named "Roslyn," was open sourced during a keynote, to cheering from the audience.

About the Author

Keith Ward is the editor in chief of Virtualization & Cloud Review. Follow him on Twitter @VirtReviewKeith.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.
Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.
VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.
Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

"Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."
Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.