> I am developing a
solution that uses both the OSS structure and XML, so that we can move at
a comfortable pace toward XML and away from OSS, but I'm still frustrated
that I have to depend on the hand-waving that the COM approach seems to
require.
I understand exactly what you mean and share your disappointment. One of the
good things about structured storage is that, just like in filesystems, you
can do incremental upgrades to on of the leaves of the document without
upsetting the rest. Something which you cannot do with plain XML unless you
use a dedicated XML database (Yukon seems to be heading in that direction
and there are others). But it's not quite the same thing.
At some point one guy wrote an open-source replacement for structured
storage in C#. It's somewhere on Sourceforge though nobody seems to have
touched it for years. As I said, it was a replacement and not a
plug-compatible library, so you weren't able to read or write WinWord
documents using the library but you could only create new documents with a
philosophy similar to structured storage. I am afraid that's all there is. I
wonder if there are any commercial implementations out there but given the
decreased interest in the format I doubt it.
--
WildHeart'2k3
