For a while now I’ve been meaning to put together a list of some of the resources that exist today to help developers get off the ground with Open XML.
My inbox this morning contained a link to a post on James Newton-King’s blog, and he appears to have saved me the trouble. James is a developer at Intergen in New Zealand, you might remember an earlier discussion about the tool that they published up on CodePlex earlier this year that allows you to convert your IIS logs to XLSX so you can work with them in Excel.
The post “Getting Started with Open XML” is a great round up of several starting points for anybody wanting to learn more about the file format and understand how to get started developing their own Open XML based tools and applications.
If you really want to get into the details of Open XML then the specification itself is probably your best starting point. As Doug Mahugh pointed out at TechEd in Malaysia earlier this year you would probably be likely to start out with part 3 of the current Ecma-376 specification which is designed to be a primer for developers, part 3 represents less than 8% of the overall material and is a great entry point for anybody who is keen to work with the Open XML file format.