MSDN Blogs Snippets

SQL Server 2-D Matrix Builder available on CodePlex

If you need to build a very complex query that returns a matrix with dynamic columns and rows from T-SQL,  you might want to take a look at this new project posted on CodePlex :

SQL Server 2-D Matrix Builder

http://www.codeplex.com/SQL2DMatrixBuilder

 

Microsoft Office Binary Formats – now freely available to all!

This afternoon we published the specs for the office binary document formats and placed them under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise. This means that anyone can now freely use these formats for any reason without any concerns over intellectual property rights.

 

Office Developer Conference: Developing and Deploying Office Solutions with VS 2008

Last Monday I presented session CLI202:  Developing and Deploying Smart Clients for Office at the Office Developer Conference in San Jose.  This blog post is a mini-version of the slides and demos from my session.

 

Banish Missing.Value with the Office Interop API Extensions

I like VSTO.  I like C#.  What I don't like is having to write VSTO code in C# ... VSTO Power Tools announced at this week's Office Developer Conference are expected to be released in the very near future.  One of those tools is the Office Interop API Extensions, a set of libraries that extend the Office object model and provide a more elegant and consistent API for the C# developer.

 

New Excel Development Blog

Ghaban Berry has created a phenomenal new blog on Excel development over at http://blogs.msdn.com/gabhan_berry/default.aspx. Not to be missed!

 

Install software on new PCs without paying for it? Through the Open Value Subscription annual true-up process, you get this flexibility

A benefit unique to the new Open Value Subscription Program, is the annual true-up and true-down feature. Through this process, for any of the Enterprise products you are licensed for through Open Value Subscription (this is not a feature of any other Open License Program), you simply count your PCs one time per year and place your order for that many subscription licenses. That is it!

What if you add new PCs during the year? No problem. Install the licensed software and don’t worry about any orders or payments until your annual anniversary. Then, you just count your PCs and place your order for that many subscription licenses for the upcoming year. That is it! No more trying to order more licenses in time for a deployment or scrambling to ensure you have enough before you install, etc.

 

An Operating System You Can Play With in C#

The contributors over at Channel 8, the web community for students interested in computer technology, are really turning us some interesting things. Recently there was a student interview with Bill Gates and then the other day I read about Cosmos. Cosmos is an operating system that is being written in C#. It's an open source project so you can get the code and mess with it yourself. Yeah, I know, you can do that with Linux too. Of course you have to be pretty good in C/C++ to mess with Linux and Linux has grown to be a pretty large bit of code these days. Sometimes one wants to dig into something a little more manageable.

Cosmos is still pretty small and there appear to be a lot of pieces that are either waiting for someone to implement or not quite so far done that there is nothing left for others to do. At the Channel 8 article you will find some step by step instructions for getting it up and running in a Virtual PC environment. And of course links to the code.