Using Office 2007 extension (i.e. docx) for skin based On-Screen keyboard.

Question

Hi guys, I'm creating a On-Screen keyboard for my application, and it supports skins as well. Here's what I'm doing with the skins, I have a folder which contains some images and a xml file which maps the images to the keyboard, I want to be able to have the folder as a zip file like in Office 2007 (.docx) and iPhone firmwares (.ipsw), I know I can simply zip the folder and change the extension, what I need to know is how to read the files in the code.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You've got two options, either 1) just use a zip library like SharpZipLib or DotNetZip or 2) try to use the System.IO.Packaging namespace. I think option 1 would be the easiest probably.

There's nothing really magical that Office and other programs are doing, they're just reading a zip file and pulling stuff out of it as needed. Instead of pulling an image from a disk you just pull it from a MemoryStream.