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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)

Great… I’ve been working with NHibernate and MySQL for a while now, without having any strange problems. For a project I’m working on, I’m using SqlClient instead of MySQL now, and strangeness occurs. When I try to Flush() a NHibernate session, here’s what is thrown:

Want to enable security trimming for your ASP.NET sitemap? Here’s how… First of all, you need a new section in your web.config system.web element: Next, you should specify which pages are visible to who: In this example, the page ForgotPassword.aspx is visible to anonymous users, while authenticated users do not need this page (as they already knew their password while logging in…). ModifyPassword.aspx is only visible to authenticated users, as anonymous users can’t do that.

A quick linkdump of some VSTS project methodology templates: RUP - http://www.osellus.com/solutions/microsoft/rup-vsts_solutions.html Scrum - http://www.scrumforteamsystem.com Macroscope - http://www.fujitsu.com/us/services/consulting/method/macroscope/index_p2.html

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.