Visual Studio 2005 and MS Word Library

Lately I've been attempting to instantiate an MS Word document in order to convert it to XML. I'll keep logging the progress to my end result.

I am aware of a couple ways to open a word document from ASP.NET 2.0. The first way is to use the traditional COM objects (and also including the Microsoft.Office.Tools.Word library .NET library). I'm going to attempt this one first. The second way is to use an MS Word project directly from Visual Studio. Since I know next to nothing about this method, I will only go further down this road if I can find more documentation. The help docs are still fairly loose and incomplete (I have found several links that don't work).

At any rate, I'll continue to note what happens and my progress.

Firefox, Can IE Ties be Broken?

I've been messing with Firefox now for about two months. I think it is a great product and I like not being tied to Internet Explorer...or am I still tied to IE? I've installed Firefox on two systems that I use quite often. As a matter a fact, I bounce back and forth regularly. Many of the features I love (such as native tabbed browsing). But I continually find myself using both IE and Firefox.

So when I combine two browsers with two systems, I get four places to search if I'm trying to do a history lookup for a site I was at a while ago (and various other things). You might say the answer is to only use Firefox. Well, both AOL IM and MSN IM use Internet Explorer exclusively. So you want to click on some news story from AIM...tough, you are using IE.

The latest release of Firefox (1.0 Preview Release) did fix one of the most annoying issues I've had. When clicking on a hyperlink in an email from MS Outlook, I would get an Outlook error saying the url could not be found even though Firefox opened and went the right page. Not that it was a big deal, just annoying (thank you for fixing this Mozilla).

I guess it boils down to the fact that for now, not even MS partners (let alone MS) respect your right to choose a browser. I won't stop using Firefox, but I don't see any option but to use multiple browsers.