Eric White is my personal replacement for Brian Jones…

Okay! The title does sound “negative” but I’m the dude that wrote “Good Stuff about Brian Jones” in 2007. The issue here is that Eric White kicks the asses I’m thinking should be kicked—and I’m willing to childishly sing his praises at the expense of getting petty with Brian Jones.

Without Eric White, I would have no ‘sane’ way of dealing with this Microsoft litigation issue mentioned earlier. Here’s the plan:

• Build a tiny, thin VSTO project that is a façade/gateway into the Open XML SDK. This stub would replace CleanXHTML.
• Use the Open XML SDK to process Flat OPC strings obtained directly from any given Word Range object.
• The ‘process’ is based entirely on Eric White’s code, the static method FlatToOpc, in “Transforming Flat OPC Format to Open XML Documents.”

My little OPC documents will litter the writeable temp folders as the Open XML SDK does its magic. One little reward for this revitalized interest in Open XML in general and the .DOCX file format in particular, is stumbling upon the way to get WPF to work in Office Solutions (VSTO):

• “Host WPF Controls in Windows Forms”  by Keyvan Nayyeri
• “Walkthrough: Hosting a WPF Control in Windows Forms”

Update: actually the two WPF articles mentioned above are not necessary to get WPF working with VSTO. All that is needed is a reference to a WPF Window object inside the VSTO project or as an external reference (my preference). More on this later…

rasx()