Office Extensibility Blog Now Offered in Russian

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I wanted to pass along some really exciting news. Brian Jones' blog is now available in Russian! Check it out here: https://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones_ru/. Our plan is to continue localizing this blog into Russian so that we can share all the Office 2010 extensibility goodness to more people. Let us know if you want to see other Office blogs get localized to Russian as well.

Zeyad Rajabi

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 10, 2009
    Hello Brian, I'd like your take on this: The US patent office has granted a Microsoft patent application, 7,571,169, which "... is directed at providing a word-processing document in a native XML file format that may be understood by an application that understands XML, or to enable another application or service to create a rich document in XML so that the word-processing application can open it as if it was one of its own documents. " Granted in 2009, filed in 2004. Am I missing something, or wasn't OpenOffice.org 1.0 out in 1999, using an XML-based file format that was later on used as a basis for Open Document Format? Or is there something in the patent that makes this unnamed file format different from .SXW, disqualifying .SXW as prior art? Thanks, Mitch 74

  • Anonymous
    August 10, 2009
    Microsoft's first, partial, use of XML for Office file formats, which was to evolve into what is called OOXML now, was in Office 97.  (It was not the default file format.)

  • Anonymous
    August 10, 2009
    Hey Mitch, I’m not an expert in patent laws or interpreting what a patent covers, but I do know that you need to look at the granted claims to get a better idea of what the patent covers, rather than looking at the general description.   In any event, please keep in mind that we have applied our Open Specification Promise to both Open XML and ODF, so whatever patents we have that are needed to implement all or part of those specifications can be used by anyone in the world without charge.  Check out the details of our OSP at http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp/default.mspx. -Brian

  • Anonymous
    August 10, 2009
    Hello again Brian, Considering that you're listed as the patented thingie's primary inventor, I though you'd be the one most qualified to talk about it - or can't you explain what you invent? And after reading the whole patent, I failed to find anything that would be specific to it compared with .SXW - apart maybe that this file format is limited to cramming everything up inside a single XML file, and that it contains only word proccessed data. Which is a strange set of limitation, come to think of it: if you ask an external application to parse the data contained therein, it'll need to parse styles, images and scripts first to access the data it actually needs (if only to validate that the nodes are well closed, before it can access the text node). What happens if you try to store anything else than words, will it be refused? Even an embedded spreadsheet? Reading the sample hint schema, the 'reference implementation' seems to be the now defunct MS Office 2003 XML format. Mitch 74

  • Anonymous
    August 11, 2009
    I appreciate the sarcasm Mitch. If you have particular questions around the technology, including how one would parse the Word 2003 XML format or the Office Open XML formats, I can definitely cover that. If you want to drill into patent law though and the applicability of claims within the patent to other technologies, I just don't have the expertise to say how it would be legally interpreted. This was one of the many motivators behind the Open Specification Promise... it means you don't need to get into interpreting patents, and instead you have the blanket statement that covers the Office XML formats as well as ODF. -Brian

  • Anonymous
    August 11, 2009
    Hi again, Well, the sarcasm actually stopped at "...or can't you explain what you invent?" (that's what one get for reading 'aloud' what one writes; the voice tone is lost in translation to written media, gomen nasai...) The other questions and assumptions were not, actually, sarcasm: considering when the patent was filed and the sample text, I would guess it was/is about MSO2003's XML file format. I couldn't find ODF mentioned in the Open Specification Promise, I must have missed it - thank you for clearing things up. And congrats on getting the patent, but really now, I wonder about its validity... Morbid curiosity, one would call it :p Mitch 74

  • Anonymous
    August 11, 2009
    No worries, I didn't take the rest of the comment as sarcasm... just appreciated the initial bit. The full list of Office XML file formats currently under the OSP is:

  • Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas
  • Office Open XML 1.0 – Ecma-376
  • Office Open XML ISO/IEC 29500:2008
  • OpenDocument Format for Office Applications v1.0 OASIS
  • OpenDocument Format for Office Applications v1.0 ISO/IEC 26300:2006
  • OpenDocument Format for Office Applications v1.1 OASIS -Brian
  • Anonymous
    August 20, 2009
    In any event, please keep in mind that we have applied our Open Specification Promise to both Open XML and ODF, so whatever patents we have that are needed to implement all or part of those specifications can be used by anyone in the world without charge.  Check out the details of our OSP at http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp/default.mspx.