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Here’s the thing: for my private development work (a.k.a. PHPExcel 8-)), I’ve been using Subversion as my source-control server (and client). As the PHPExcel is hosted on CodePlex, one would suspect I would be using the Team Foundation hosted service which is provided for free. Not really… Here’s the thing: CodePlex provides a web interface to work items, which me and my project members use a lot. But since one needs Visual Studio to use the TFS code repository in a comfortable way, without having to use any command-line tools, I decided to use Subversion as the source repository.

Just a quick note on the new PHPExcel 1.3.5 release. There are some cool new features included! One of the new features is rich text: one can now write coloured and styled text in a cell. Here’s an example of how the feature demo result file looks: This is of course not all. Jakub had a couple of sleepless nights, but managed to port in the PEAR Spreadsheet classes. Meaningless? No! PHPExcel now supports Excel2007 and older versions, too. Want to write an Excel document for Excel200? No problem: There’s even a cooler part related to this, and that is .xlsx to .xls conversion! Here’s how:

Having a PHP background, I’ve been using .htaccess mod_rewrite in Apache for ages. ASP.NET allows rewriting too, but using a different syntax than mod_rewrite. Using the attached library, you can now use mod_rewrite syntax to perform rewrites on your ASP.NET application. Here’s how… First of all, you need to download the attached library. Reference it from your web project, and register it as a module in Web.config, preferrably as the first one: Second, create a file UrlRewriter.xml in the root of your web project, and add rewrite conditions in there:

For everyone who has read my article on NHibernate, here’s a story for you… When building an application, everyone comes to a point where one needs to batch-update records in a database table, based on one or more criteria. Let’s say, for example, there’s a table “User” containing an activation date. And you want to remove all users that have activated in 1999. In a regular database environment, or when using ADO coding, one would write a DbCommand “DELETE FROM User WHERE activationdate < ‘2000-01-01’”.

A quick annoyed post… I just spent two hours searching the Internet for a means on how to recursively download a complete FTP folder, command-line, and in a simple way. Oh yeah, and preferably freeware. The solutions I found were not what I expected: a $50 software product providing a GUI (I said command-line! [:@]), a bloated scheduler thingy that does download in the background (I said simple! [8o|]), to batch-files relying on Windows built-in ftp.exe and a gigantic list of all files that need to be downloaded.

Just finished painting, unpacked some boxes, and here we are: a new home! The people from Eurobesthosting.com (shameless commercial plug in my blog) provided me my own ASP.NET server, which is now serving this page/RSS feed to you! A new home also means new URL’s… I did my best forwarding all old URL’s to this new page, but I won’t keep the forwarding for the next century… The only noteworthy thing for you as a RSS reader, is the RSS feed URL, which has changed to: /rss.aspx. If you placed a link to my blog on your website, please change that link to /.

The information on this website represents my personal opinion. My opinion may differ with other people’s opinion and my employer’s opinion. This website is by no means related to other people nor my employer.

A lot of news around OpenXML these days, so I decided to bundle some things into one big blog post. In .NET 3.0, there’s the System.IO.Packaging API, which allows programmatic access to OpenXML packages (amongst them Office2007 files). Since this API is quite low-level, the Microsoft people introduced a new SDK built on top of System.IO.Packaging, which allows you to use strongly typed classes for document parts. Checkout a code sample on Wouter’s blog and see for yourself: this SDK provides access to an OpenXML package in a much easier way than System.IO.Packaging. Download the SDK here.

Some new TFS links I found: Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Guide http://www.codeplex.com/TFSGuide Work Item Creator http://www.codeplex.com/wicreator/

The new version of PHPExcel has just been released, bringing 1.3.0 to the public. New features include formula calculation, inserting and removing columns/rows, auto-sizing columns, freezing panes, … One of the new features in PHPExcel is formula calculation. Just like Excel or any other spreadsheet application, PHPExcel now provides support for calculating certain cell values, using a formula. For example, the formula “=SUM(A1:A10)” evaluates to the sum of values in A1, A2, …, A10.