InfoPath and CAB Files

As Scott mentioned yesterday, we’ve been playing with InfoPath and we were sufficiently impressed. We had some great meetings with Microsoft today, and took some time to demo the tools for some Microsofties that hadn’t had the time yet to see the environment. We did the same demo - building a simple front-end for adding new weblog entries to ChrisAn’s BlogX. Demo worked great - went from nothing to spell-checking front-end in less than 3 minutes.

Someone then mentioned how cool it would be if the .xsn specification file was completely transparent as well (read: XML), but we were disappointed to learn (after opening in Notepad) that it is clearly a binary format. How could they stoop so low?

So what do I learn after arriving in my hotel room and pulling down my feeds in NewsGator? Clemens points out that it is just a CAB file. And inside you can find tidy little (OK, so not all of them are quite so little) XML, XSLT, XSD, JS file. Pleasant surprise.