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Half the world has been focussing on the release of the new Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 last week. That is good, as .NET 3.5 offers lots of nice new features and improvements. In the blogosphere, I haven’t read much about an extension I’ve been waiting for anxiously: the new ASP.NET MVC framework. Luckily, Scott Guthrie posted some examples on it, and I can’t wait for a preview to be released next week. I’ll keep you informed!

At one of our clients, we used to have only one server for ASP.NET applications (including web services). Since this machine is actually business-critical and load is constantly growing, the need for a second machine is higher than ever. This morning I was asked to set up a simple demo of a load-balanced ASP.NET environment. I already did this in PHP a couple of times, but in ASP.NET, this question was totally new to me. Things should not be very different, I thought. And this thought proved right!

It’s been a while since I posted something related to PHP and OpenXML, but I fixed that glitch in this blog post. Browsing CodePlex, I found a new PHP OpenXML project named OpenXML API. From what I can see, this project is just in the “Hello world” stage of creating Word documents in PHP, but not so long ago my PHPExcel project was in that stage too…

Currently, I’m giving an ASP.NET classroom training at our company, which actually is quite good for me: I needed to refresh all ASP.NET concepts, as those all fade away slowly when you don’t use them for a while… Now, one of those refreshed concepts is ASP.NET’s caching.

Here’s a cool present just before the weekend… 2 days ago, Wouter posted on his blog about an article he co-operated on for MSDN: OpenXML in Healthcare. Being both a Microsoft and PHP fan (yes, you can curse me, I don’t care), I thought of porting (part of) the sample code from his article into PHP. Except for the document signing, as I did not have many time to write this sample code…

Assuming everyone knows what generics are, let’s get down to business right away. PHP does not support generics or something similar, though it could be very useful in PHP development. Luckily, using some standard OO-practises, a semi-generic array can easily be created, even in multiple ways! Here’s the road to PHP generics.

Read this on Bernie’s blog: *“All of the pain caused by inheritance can be traced back to the fact that inheritance forces ‘is-a’ rather than ‘has-a’ relationships. If class R2Unit extends Droid, then a R2Unit is-a Droid. If class Jedi contains an instance variable of type Lightsabre, then a Jedi has-a Lightsabre. The difference between is-a and has-a relationships is well known and a fundamental part of OOAD, but what is less well known is that almost every is-a relationship would be better off re-articulated as a has-a relationship.”*

Have you ever written code that makes external (Soap) webservice calls? Tried that same code on your company network? Most of the time, this does not work very well due to a proxy server sitting in between, requiring authentication etc. You can start tweaking your Web.config file to set this proxy the right way, or you can override the generated web service class and include the following code snippet: The only thing left to do is use this “SomethingProxyEnabledService” class instead of the regular “com.example.service.something”. There you go, automagical proxy authentication!

Trying to speed up some things in a demo ASP.NET application for a customer, I found a really simple and effective way to remove some HTTP modules from the ASP.NET pipeline. When you are not using WindowsAuthentication or PassportAuthentication or …, you can easily disable those modules. This decreases ASP.NET bootstrapping time as there are fewer object creations to do every page load… Now, how to do this? Very easy! Fire up your Visual Studio, and open Web.config.

I’ve been too busy implementing SpreadsheetML in PHP, that I completely forgot to write something on OpenXML and C# on my blog. Luckily, Joris did now: Generating Office 2007 documents in C#. Now learn some PHP too, Joris, I can use a hand on PHPExcel [:P] Here are some additional links to get you started: