James Newton-King : TextGlow

TextGlow CodePlex Project

James Newton-King — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 05:50:27 GMT

By popular demand TextGlow now has a CodePlex Project.

Go go forth and, er, collaborate!

TextGlow SharePoint Web Part

James Newton-King — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 02:20:22 GMT

Jeroen Ritmeijer has taken the TextGlow source code and integrated it into a SharePoint web part. Check out the article he wrote about the new web part here.

TextGlow Open Sourced

James Newton-King — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 20:55:35 GMT

The source code for TextGlow, a Silverlight application I wrote and was launched a year ago at MIX08 to much fanfare, has been released as open source under the Microsoft Public License.

TextGlow was one of the first Silverlight 2.0 applications released and it showcased many of the new features and possibilities of Office Open XML and Silverlight.

The source code for TextGlow has been released along with an article published at OpenXML Developer, TextGlow - View Open XML Word documents with Silverlight. The article is a high level overview of the internals of TextGlow to help developers get started with their own applications.

I feel compelled to put in a disclaimer that the source code is somewhat… rough in certain places. I was the sole developer on the project and had just a couple of months to try and recreate as much as Word as possible. Fighting to keep what I had written against the constant stream of pre-MIX Silverlight 2.0 betas didn’t help either

You can find a link to the source code at the bottom of the article.

TextGlow Coverage Roundup

James Newton-King — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 22:08:00 GMT

www.textglow.com - The TextGlow press release displayed in TextGlow (+1 for recursiveness!)

Blog posts

Intergen Blog - Announcing TextGlow - a world first from Intergen, NZ
James Newton-King - Silverlight 2.0 + OOXML = TextGlow
Chris Auld - Silverlight 2.0 + Office Open XML == TextGlow
Tim Sneath - A Great Early Silverlight 2 Showcase: TextGlow
Gray Knowlton - Silverlight viewer for Open XML
Oliver Bell - New Zealand’s Intergen Deliver OpenXML Viewing Using Silverlight
Gavin Barron - Intergenite delivers in browser viewer for docx

Videos

YouTube - Intergen TextGlow: Open XML Document (DOCX) in Silverlight
VisitMIX - Straight from Word to Web without Office: Intergen

Radio (!?!)

Radio NZ - This Way Up

NZ Media

Computerworld - Intergen launches new software in Las Vegas
Computerworld - MIX08 'fizzes' over Intergen applications
InfoTech - Silverlight shed on Word docs
Otago Daily Times - NZ company launches software in Las Vegas
Geekzone - Intergen releases Office Open XML web application

(plus lots lots more from around the world)

Silverlight 2.0 + OOXML = TextGlow

James Newton-King — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 10:05:00 GMT

Over the last couple of months I have had the opportunity to work on an exciting project called TextGlow.

TextGlow is a Silverlight 2.0 application for viewing Word 2007 documents on the Internet. With TextGlow it is possible to instantly view a document within a web page, with no Microsoft Office applications installed. Since Silverlight is cross platform the user doesn't even have to be running Windows!

Demo

TextGlow displaying its own press release. Click the fullscreen button (second from the left) for a better view:

How it Works

The first step to TextGlow displaying a document is going out and downloading it. TextGlow is a Silverlight application and runs completely client side, and that means it needs a local copy to work with. This process happens automatically using the new WebClient class in Silverlight 2.0. Like you would expect from a class called WebClient it provides simple web request, but what makes WebClient great are the download progress events it provides. Making a progress bar to show the status of a download is a snap.

Next the various files inside the document are extracted. An OOXML document (docx) is actually just a zip file containing XML and other resource files, such as any images that might appear in the document. Fortunately Silverlight has built in zip file support using the Application.GetResourceStream method.

Now that TextGlow has the OOXML it parses the XML and builds an object model of the document. To parse the XML I used LINQ to XML, which is new in Silverlight 2.0. After an initial learning curve (mainly suppressing the memory of many years of working with horrible DOM APIs ), I found LINQ to XML to be wonderful to work with. I blogged about a couple of the cool features I discovered while working with LINQ to XML along the way.

Using the object model of the document TextGlow then creates WPF controls to display the content. Writing custom Silverlight WPF controls to render the content was definitely the hardest aspect of the project. When I started work on it with the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha there were no layout controls like StackPanel or Grid. Everything was absolutely position and I had to write my own flow layout controls. Paragraphs and complex flowing text was also surprisingly difficult to get right in Silverlight. Fortunatly Silverlight 2.0 includes controls like these and makes writing an application like TextGlow much easier.

The final step in display a document is simply WPF plying its magic and rendering the WPF controls. The user now has the Word 2007 document render on their screen using nothing but the power of Silverlight.

Thanks to...

TextGlow has be a great application to work on and it was awesome being able to design and build my own idea.

Thanks to Nas for mocking up the UI. If the UI was left up to me TextGlow would make Notepad look good

Big thanks to Chris Auld for providing a launch pad for the idea and then providing regular injections of enthusiasm into the project.

If you're interested in seeing more of TextGlow, visit www.textglow.com

Update:

TextGlow Open Sourced