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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:

Earlier this week, I was playing around with SandCastle, and found that the SandCastle Help File Builder (SHFB) was a great tool to quickly create SandCastle documentation. No more XML writing, just a few clicks and documentation is compiled into a HTML Help file or as a MSDN-style website.

The last few days, I’ve been working with Wouter to discuss some new features and ideas for his PackageExplorer. PE is an editor for OpenXML packages, enabling you to view the contents and relations of different parts in a package, to validate XML against OpenXML schemes, …

I’m sure you have already heared of SilverLight before, right? If not: it’s Microsoft’s answer to Adobe Flash, providing the same features + XAML-like markup + easier databinding + … Now you’re up to pubDatetime: the Redmond people have just released a new site, Microsoft Tafiti, which is basically Live Search combined with a rich SilverLight interface. Tafiti means “do research” in Swahili. Don’t think I’m a native Swahili speaker though, I found this here 8-)

Here’s one I’d really like to share with everyone trying to build ASP.NET websites using TFS Build. First of all, a little story about the project setup…

Over the last few months, Doug, Wouter, Brian and lots of other people delivered a series of OpenXML workshops around the globe. Those who were there, and those who weren’t, can now download all content of these workshops from OpenXMLdeveloper.org. There are some interesting slideshows available for those of you who never heared about OpenXML before, as well as some nice code samples to get you started developing in C# or Java. As a side note: I also spotted a good article on OpenXML, explaining the Open Packaging Conventions with a self-created file format (based on OpenXML).

After having a few months of problems using PHP and fopen(‘zip://something.xlsx#xl/worksheets/sheet1.xml’, ‘r’), I finally found the reason of that exact line of code giving errors on some PC’s… Assuming this uses a call to parse_url under the hood, I tried parsing this, resulting in the following URL parts: Array ( [scheme] => zip [host] => something.xlsx#xl [path] => /worksheets/sheet1.xml ) That’s just not correct… Parsing should return the following: Conclusion: beware when using parse_url and the zip file wrapper!

Seems that, according to this Wikipedia entry, I work at Microsoft: To clarify this: I do not work at Microsoft, but at Dolmen, one of the top Belgian IT firms. I do work with Microsoft technology and tend to promote their technology too, but no job at Microsoft. (Thank you Wouter for showing me this)