Recent Posts

Workaround for PHP file_exists on ZIP file contents

Recently, I was writing some PHP code, to check if a specific file existed in a ZIP file. PHP has this special feature called "stream wrappers", which basically is a system which enables PHP to do I/O operations on streams. A stream can be a file, a socket, a SSH connection, ... Each of these streams has its own wra... Read more »

Scalable Apps with Asynchronous Programming in ASP.NET

A while ago, I posted about the DevDays, and some interesting sessions I took. One of these sessions was "Scalable Apps with Asynchronous Programming in ASP.NET", by Jeff Prosise. Searching the Internet, I found that Jeff also published an article on this subject on MSDN, which can be found on the following URL: htt... Read more »

Developer & IT Pro days - Ghent - Day 2

Just got back from the second and last day at the DevDays. It's all more exhausting than I thought it would be. First of all: driving from Antwerp to Ghent and arrive there in time means to get up early. Second, a lot of information and understanding needs to be processed and absorbed. Today, I've attended a sessio... Read more »

Developer & IT Pro Days - Ghent - Day 1

Day one of the Belgium Developer & IT Pro days is finished. I've been attending some inspiring sessions. First of all, Jelle Druyts showed us a quick overview of the Guidance Automation Toolkit. Interesting, and usable in many situations as standard Visual Studio templates do not always fulfill all your needs. ... Read more »

Apache and IIS on same host, port 80, Windows XP

Yesterday, I decided to install an Apache web server on my development machine, next to IIS. Unfortunately, both use port 80, and I did not want to set one of the 2 servers to another port. Luckily, I remembered that IIS can be configured to only listen on one IP, and Apache on another. Easy: 2 IP addresses for my P... Read more »

New screen, Samsung is great!

Yesterday, I bought myself a Samsung SyncMaster 940BW wide screen TFT. My old screen, a IIyama 17 inch monster weighing CRT, needed a replacement. Not because of it's age, but because I really started hating this huge block on my desk. The SyncMaster is a great screen. Not the newest, not the most feature-loaded, ... Read more »

PHPExcel 1.0.0 final

I'm quite proud to announce the 1.0.0 version of PHPExcel, a set of classes that allows you to wirte Excel2007 files from PHP. Since my last post on this, a lot of things happened, feature-wise and project-wise. Feature-wise, conditional formatting was added, and a first attempt to a Excel2007 file reader has been... Read more »

Five things you didn’t know about me…

I was tagged by Joris and Kristof, so I guess it's about time I give away some secrets about myself. Did you know that... ... I wrote my first letter of programming code in Visual Basic 4, which I bought on 4 gray floppy disks when I was 12. ... I "split" my desert cakes and breakfast cakes: cream and cake... Read more »

PHP Excel classes on CodePlex

Just for the record: my PHP Excel classes have been released on CodePlex under a GPL license, and will be further released over there. The full URL: www.codeplex.com/PHPExcel. This is an imported post. It was imported from my old blog using an automated tool and may contain formatting errors and/or broken ima... Read more »

Back from winter vacation!

No posts last week: I was on a ski vacation to Pitztal, Austria. Found a cheap (and good!) hotel over there, Pension Haid, which offered me breakfast and dinner for 36 EUR per night. I've been skiing on Rifflsee and the Pitztaler Gletscher, which offers great slopes (and also good weather conditions last week)... Read more »