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One of the new (planned) features of PHPExcel is to implement parsing and calculating Excel formulas. One thing every developer should do is not to try to reinvent the wheel. Therefore, a Google search learned me someone wrote a Excel expression parser in JavaScript, which parses an expression into a tree. Parsing Excel formulas (expressions) in JavaScript is done here. Someone ported this to C# too, and as of today, it is ported to PHP5 too 8-). The only thing left to do is building this into PHPExcel, and performing calculations using the parsed tree…

Just like my colleague Kristof did last friday, I passed the Microsoft.NET Framework 2.0 - Web-based Client Development (Exam 070-528) exam yesterday, resulting in a new certification title: I’m now offically a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist for .NET framework 2.0 Web applications.

Have you ever used the ASP.NET PasswordRecovery control, or the CreateUserWizard? Probably, you used the mail capabilities of these controls too, and set up a MailDefinition to send an e-mail when the control did his job. Personally, I missed this functionality when wanting to send mails to users.

Yay! My new article on Excel, OpenXML and PHP has just been released in php|architect! A copy-paste action from http://www.phparch.com/issue.php?mid=102: “A few months ago, Microsoft released Office 2007, a version of their office suite that generates open source documents. Here, Maarten Balliauw gives an overview of the history and the politics surrounding the release before moving on to introduce his PHPExcel project, an early adoption of Microsoft’s OpenXML API that enables Excel 2007 spreadsheets to be generated with PHP.”

Event Validation is a new feature in ASP.NET 2.0 which provides an additional level of checks on postback actions. It verifies whether a postback from a control on client-side is really from that control and not from a malicious person trying to break your application. Even if you forget to add security checks of your own, ASP.NET provides this functionality, because this feature is enabled by default. Sometimes, it is safe to turn this of, but Microsoft tries to have developers turn this of when they know what they are doing.

Currently, I’m playing around with TFS (Team Foundation Server), and here’s just a quick linkdump of some TFS tools, mainly on CodePlex. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa718351.aspx#cipp http://www.codeplex.com/TFSAdmin http://www.codeplex.com/automation http://www.codeplex.com/TFSCodeReviewFlow http://www.codeplex.com/tfsconsole http://www.codeplex.com/TfsPowerPack

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 wrapper, which serves as an adapter between PHP and the underlying resource. This enables PHP to do, for example, a file_get_contents() on all sorts of streams. Assuming regular PHP file functions would be sufficient, I coded the following:

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: http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/03/WickedCode/default.aspx.

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 session on C#3.0 and what’s next by Raj Pai. Interesting material, seems to me that C# will evolve into something more declarative and flexible than it already is.

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. Afterwards, Jeff Prosise spoke on using background threads in ASP.NET web sites, and how this can speed things up (a lot!). Another session was given by Doug Mahugh on OpenXML. Funny to notice my Prague co-developer also attended his session earlier this week.