Reviews
I had the opportunity to play around with generating word documents last week. At first I looked at what I had used before (the Office PIA).
I quickly remembered that it was not very easy to work with because most of it is based on COM interop anyways. Further-more, I stumbled across a little MSDN article that stated that the Office PIA should not be used to generate documents from a server; it suggested that it only be used in desktop application environments where a user is controlling the application itself. I imagine that is because the Office PIA really only invokes the Word application and tells the Word application what to do in real-time (or something like that)… and that makes sense to me. Can you imagine a web server that gets even 100 users spawning each of their own processes of word.exe to generate a doc?! Production… Nightmare… (more…)
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Today I saw about a dozen lines of code in a project that I was working on simply dedicated to determining whether or not there are duplicates within a stringlist (List). This made me start to question whether or not there was a better way of doing this, to which the little light bulb in my head went off and directed me towards LINQ. A quick search on the web for “Finding duplicates with LINQ” landed me at this chunk of code:
myList.GroupBy(i => i).Where(g => g.Count() > 1).Select(g => g.Key).ToList()
This works beautifully and returns the non-unique items in myList. This not only reduces the line count in applications needing to do similar operations the harder way, but to me it is much more readable. These days, with the complex applications that are getting built, readability is a major importance in code. (more…)
Working with the GDI+ framework is not (in some cases) as trivial as you would think. It may be easy to create a new Bitmap object and draw some primitive shapes and text to it, but when you start trying to use the GDI+ library for changing the format of an Image it gets a little more tricky. Here I am going to discuss some of the ins and outs of working with GDI+ for image formatting, such as creating/saving images and changing image.s formats. (more…)
In my previous blog about getting desktop applications to speak to your web applications I got a taste of what Silverlight is about. It was the first experience I.ve had with Silverlight or even WPF and sparked my interest on the technology. Not only that, I stumbled onto a couple articles describing LINQ and how much it has improved which intrigued me. Now, I am working on re-creating my .Tournament Management. program using Silverlight and LINQ (in a web service). In this blog I won.t give a full detail on every aspect of my project, but I will provide information on some of the key discoveries I.ve made. Even though I was surprised by the amount of articles available on the web about them there still seemed to be a couple issues that I struggled with and couldn’t find immediate answers to. (more…)
The last several days I have investigated how to get desktop application to communicate with a web application. I would have to assume that this I not a very popular approach because there just doesn.t seem to be very much put in place to allow this. Sure, you can create a web service to act as the middle-man, but I don.t want to. I just want to be able to send a small fragment of data from a .NET desktop application to an ASP.NET web application to indicate that it is done processing. In the end of my research I have only found one approach that REALLY does what I want it to do.
The biggest problem with any approach that I have found is that there isn.t a good way to launch a desktop application from a web-page. I.ve been trying to come up with a solution that wouldn.t require the user to actually install the desktop application. My solution to this problem has been to use .NET.s ClickOnce deployment model. As long as the user is using internet explorer this seems to work great. Unfortunately this approach doesn.t work quite as well on non-IE browsers.
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