Interview by Ryan Harte: February 19, 2010
 

Chris Klug is a .net developer from Sweden and is currently focused on the development of Silverlight applications. http://chris.59north.com/

 In this interview we talk to Chris about his discovery of Open XML, how it can benefit Silverlight developers, and the library he has built to integrate Silverlight and Office.

 
What is the coolest implementation of Open XML you have seen?  If Office, what is the second coolest?
Well that would obviously office but as you put that in the question also, that I have seen, that was the second one if not office I would say my Silverlight implementation.  I have created a Silverlight implementation of being able to create Open XML documents from Silverlight since Silverlight 3 doesn’t have print support it’s a pretty good thing to be able to generate office documents out of Silverlight then being able to print those instead.  Um, but it’s also basically the only other Open XML thing I have seen except for office so that has to be it.
 
You started off as a web-developer and now delve into Silverlight, so what got you into Open XML?
Um, to be perfectly honest I got into Open XML because I was told to look at the code they had in the samples on the website and go through the PowerPoint’s and all that on the Open XML Developer website and see that everything looked ok for the new Office release and when doing that I realised that Open XML was actually kind of interesting and that is why I started with doing some Silverlight implementations of it to see what happened.
 
Cool, that’s the best way to learn is to just get thrown in.
Absolutely
 
Tell us more about this project, and functions you found that were going to be helpful for Silverlight?
Um, well as I said because Silverlight lacks the support of printing in Silverlight3, and also the fact that Silverlight has a good data visualisation platform that makes it possible to show off graphs and other ways of showing off data, being able to that export that into something all people can use or most people can read in some format is kind of interesting and Open XML gives you that support of being able to create spreadsheets and word documents that people um can view and that they can take off line and pass around in a different way than they do with Silverlight so I think the potential of going from a Silverlight rich internet application like Silverlight showing off rich data and then taking it offline by converting it into Open XML is a pretty interesting idea.
 
What feedback have you had from your library?
So far, not too much I’ve managed to put it onto Codeplex and haven’t actually said it to anybody that I put it on Codeplex but it has been downloaded a couple of times already and I’ve put it on my blog as an early release of it that I will then rebuild.  It is one of the most read parts on my blog to be perfectly honest so people are interested in Open XML and Silverlight.
 
So I guess overall, Open XML has helped you quite a bit, well more into the future with Silverlight?
Yup, absolutely.
 
Where do you seek help on Open XML development?
That would be two places, it would be OpenXMLdeveloper.org where you get all the information that is needed, ah actually its three places, but even though that is a good place I do end up googleing most of my stuff and Google helps a lot and Google has the tendency to send you off to MSDN with the specs on the SDK so I have taken a lot of input from there to go on and then I have actually reverse engineered so to say the Open XML stuff so I do what I want in word or excel then I un-package that, and look at XML and then I  recreate that structure using that code instead.
 
What do you do when you are not building software?
Um, I do kite surfing, so kite surfing would be one of the main reasons that I am in New Zealand and it’s my one big passion that I do and if I could choose between that and building software I would probably go for kite surfing.
 
BOTH AT THE SAME TIME?
Not really that’s going to be hard!
 
Thanks for joining us for the interview and good-luck for the future.