So we've been working on a great project over the past few months called TextGlow. It's the brainchild of James Newton-King and it's basically an Office Open XML file viewer written in Silverlight.

This means that you can view OOXML documents (default format in Office 2007) without having Office (or any other OOXML application) installed. Being Silverlight it works on Windows and Macintosh and we're also hoping to get it going on Moonlight- the Novell sponsored open source Silverlight implementation. Today at MIX08 and at another conference in Europe it was announced that SIlverlight will be avaialble on both Windows Mobile and several Nokia mobile phones. We'll be working hard to get it nailed for those too.

I don't want to steal James' thunder around how we built it but it would be remiss of me not to call out the team who have worked really hard on this project.

From our Intergen Interactive team, Nas Kahn made TextGlow look nice. When you look at it you'll see two things- a big white rectangle full of stuff that looks like it could only have come about from a '6000 word specification' and a really nice looking UI that wraps it up. Nas did the sexy stuff!

James did the stuff in the big white rectangle. Not as easy as it looks but mainly because Silverlight 2.0 is still pretty green and we had a few version changes and API changes over the past few months. James can provide the gory details.

Tony Yee (The world famous in Intergen Mr TY) Project Managed the team and worked hard to ensure that my propensity to feature creep any project I am let near didn't rub off on the team.

Katy Sweetman and Dan Ormond who have worked their tails off over the past few weeks helping me get the PR ready for launching at MIX.

So without further waffle from me.

Go Here To See TextGlow. A bit more press can bee seen over on the Intergen site here.