Read (and write) Office document custom properties without automation

I am looking for a s开发者_开发百科olution for reading (and possibly writing) custom properties of Office documents (both old and new formats) without resorting to Office automation.

I have found Dsofile.dll which seems to work good for old formats but chokes on new ones with a "class not registered". KB remarks say that a certain "Office Compatibility Pack" needs to be installed for this to work but I am really looking for an out-of-box solution.

I am not searching for a solution that reads (and writes) custom properties without Office installed. Actually, I am considering Office to be a prerequisite. It is just that I want a solution that does not require Office automation for simple custom property handling.

There is a "Microsoft Office Metadata Handler" Windows Explorer Shell Extension that shows/manages custom properties for Office documents pretty much the way I want to do it. With Dsofile.dll I seem to have one half of the solution by covering old Office formats.

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DSOFile is what to use for the binary formats.

For the newer formats, you can just use XML (Open XML SDK is a fine choice, but you can also just access the DOCX/XLSX/PPTX file formats with System.IO.Packaging in .NET if you don't want to be all that heavy handed with yet-another-dll). See this article for accessing and setting properties: Manipulating Word 2007 Files with the Open XML Format API (Part 2 of 3)