I spent a few days implementing a component that adds some custom properties to Office 2007 files. Using the System.IO.Packaging namespace from .NET 3.0, and looking at some sample code in some Visual Studio snippets, things went pretty smoothly. Just when I thought I was done, though, I tried opening a manipulated .docx file in Word and got the message “The file is corrupt and cannot be opened.”

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When running a .NET application for the first time after rebooting or hibernating the computer, you might find that it takes a long time to start up. I’ve been trying to address this problem in a few situations recently. In spite of having read several articles on the subject, I wasn’t having much success. Following some of the advice gave no noticeable improvement, and some (like using NGEN) actually slowed down startup. But I had some success recently, so I thought I’d explain how.

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