News
Microsoft Open Sources its Open XML SDK
It's been made a project on Github.
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.