The Word Processor Windows Forms Control
For at least five years (probably more), the concept of running my own instance of Microsoft Office Word in a Windows Form (whether a VB6 form or a .NET one) has been with me. In the old days, this seemed laughable because RAM was limited and Word was so huge.
Well, the next version of VSTO is very near this concept—in a perverse way: you will be able to add Windows Forms controls to an instance of Office Word—and Excel for that matter (Outlook too!). However, ‘near’ this is, it is still too far and too much for me. We need to see a small subset of Office Word functionality wrapped up in a Control that can be dragged and dropped on the design surface.
So I am looking at the beta WinFX SDK documentation, the list of new Windows Forms Controls and I only see the RichTextBox Control. This control represents a complete lack of awareness of the XML-related innovations of Office Word. I still do not understand why this control is incapable of saving its data in an XML format—like, say, XHTML.
I have probably said this before but the only “Rich Text” control that comes near to the heart of this matter is at Xstandard.com—unfortunately, it is written entirely in unmanaged code (but I will still try to use it anyway)… There is a Rich Text control in InfoPath that does almost exactly what I want but I assume that it will take years before this control is shared across teams at Microsoft—right about now, it is welded to InfoPath with a 20th century blowtorch.
Office Word is probably “too complex” to break down into clearly defined strata of functionality. I am tempted to assume that at least one person at Microsoft who knows the code wants to rewrite the whole thing. Perhaps the ‘top-secret’ rewrite process has been going on since before the announcement of the .NET Framework. When we find that my implications are correct, I would rather have the “evangelists” at Microsoft be honest about this effort. I would prefer that they openly admit that Office applications are so deeply invested in technology that Microsoft wishes to ‘abandon’ instead of trying to drag us developers through their “transitional phase” on a need to know basis.
And, yes, kind friend, I am aware of Brian Jones. He has very little time to care about the RichTextBox Control—and the Windows Forms team is not concerned about “Office-like” functionality apart from toolbars and buttons—and the VSTO team is preoccupied with Windows Forms functionality in Office applications—not Office functionality in Windows Forms applications.
Meanwhile the people at Xstandard.com and the AbiSource.com should consider porting over a .NET Rich Text control for Windows Forms. I can’t guarantee that its popularity would drive users to their products but it would make me and other developers less concerned about the ‘mysteries’ of Microsoft.
I made a flippant survey under “Flippant Remarks about XHTML Editors; XHTML Editing Components for Enterprise Data Solutions” back in 2004 ranting about the rancid subject of this Blog post.