Tag: General
All the articles with the tag "General".
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Commandline FTP folder download
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.
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My blog has just moved...
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 /.
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OpenXML news overview
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.
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A small TFS linkdump...
Some new TFS links I found: Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Guidehttp://www.codeplex.com/TFSGuide Work Item Creatorhttp://www.codeplex.com/wicreator/
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New PHPExcel release: 1.3.0
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. Have a look at this: if you write the following line of code in the invoice demo included with PHPExcel, it evaluates to the value "64": Another nice feature of PHPExcel's formula parser, is that it can automatically adjust a formula when inserting/removing rows/columns. Here's an example:
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Excel Formula Parsing using PHP?
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...
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MCTS for .NET framework 2.0 Web applications
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.
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SendMailControl for ASP.NET
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. Luckily, ASP.NET is very extensible. I decided to create my own control providing an easy and convenient way to sending templated e-mails. Just set the From, CC, Subject and Body properties in the designer, and use the Send() method from code. Not the cleanest implementation of catching SMTP errors, but it was sufficient for my use. If you need to catch SMTP errors, you still need to add that... Anyway, as a gift for anyone who needs it, please find my SendMailControl underneath: [code:c#]
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Excel, OpenXML and PHP
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."
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ASP.NET 2.0 Event Validation
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. Unfortunately: I came across Event Validation… A user control on a master page convinced ASP.NET that a postback within that same user control was unsafe, resulting in the following error: