Dotmad.net

In a recent announcement Microsoft declared a “Strategic Change” in their relationship with the open source community:

• Publishing on MSDN over 30,000 pages of documentation for Windows client and server protocols and API. Protocol documentation for additional products, such as Office 2007, will be published in the upcoming months.
• Microsoft is providing a covenant not to sue open source developers for development or non-commercial distribution of implementations of these protocols. These developers will be able to use the documentation for free to develop products.
• Microsoft will design new APIs for the Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications in Office 2007 to enable developers to plug in additional (OS?) document formats

However, although the company said developers will not need to take a licence or pay a royalty or other fees to access this information, those covered by patents will still be subject to a royalty from developers who want to use them for commercial applications (Microsoft said these royalty rates would be “reasonable and non-discriminatory”).
Red Hat seems to think this is a move designed to “foreclose competition from the open source community”, making Microsoft’s move “too little, too late”.

According to Steve Ballmer “There were certainly things we did to get into compliance with the European (Union) Commission’s decision”. However, the EU regulators are expressing skepticism regarding this statement.

Real change or a hoax? we’ll have to wait and see…

Syntax:
VLOOKUP(A2, D$11:E:22, 2, False)

Means:
If the value of cell A2 matches a value in the supplied range (Cells D11 to E22), the function’s result is the value of the second column from the range, from the row containing the matching value.

This function and the matching HLookup function can be very handy.

Oren asked his readers for a way to create Word & Excel documents without using COM.
I read the answers, and came up with this list:

Excel:
Essential XlsIO for Windows Forms
Aspose Cells

Word:
Essential DocIO for Windows Forms
Aspose Words
TX Text Control

I ruled out all OpenXML solutions, because they really work only with Office 2007.
Users of Office 2003 may be able to use them, but only after installing a package, and users of older versions (as well as Open Office users) can’t read those documents.

Joel Spolsky wrote a post dealing with Microsoft’s strategy, adding a little “PS” at the end of the post:
PS: in researching this article, I tried to open some of my notes which were written in an old version of Word for Windows. Word 2007 refused to open them for “security” reasons and pointed me on a wild-goose chase of knowledge base articles describing obscure registry settings I would have to set to open old files. It is extremely frustrating how much you have to run in place just to keep where you were before with Microsoft’s products, where every recent release requires hacks, workarounds, and patches just to get to where you were before.
I have started recommending to my friends that they stick with Windows XP, even on new computers, because the few new features on Vista just don’t justify the compatibility problems.

Some time ago I had a problem causing Office to start an installation dialog every time I tried running one of the application. I tried re-installing, which solved the issue, but caused the database connection window in Visual studio to fail. Fixing that negated the use of Window’s search feature.
Finally I managed to get everything to work (Word occasionally opens the installation dialog when I try to open a document from a link), but I learned I can’t trust 3 applications made by the same firm (Office, VS, Windows) to run together in harmony, something that should be obvious in an ideal world.

I read a lot on Vista and Office 2007, enough to decide I have no reason to upgrade just to say I have the “latest cool release” - I will only upgrade if the new release has a feature (or features) I need.
And as Joel, I’ll probably recommend Windows XP to people buying a new computer.