I’m glad to report that one of the numbers published by Roman in his recent post is now out of date. I’m talking of the Aspose.Words RTF export speed. We wanted to optimize the export before v4.0 final is released and we’ve succeeded Basically, exporting documents to RTF format is more time and memory consuming process than to DOC or WordML. It’s because of some specifics of the format. For example, “correct” RTF (such as that produced by AW ) should include extra fragments to satisfy old readers and the emission of those fragments might take an extra time.
Class Design: Which is the Best?
What class design do you prefer? I assume most of you follow Microsoft guidelines, and it’s reasonable. However, practice shows that not all the recommendations should be blindly obeyed. I don’t imply here fundamental rules like “never make instance fields public” (yet this also might be broken in some rare cases – imagine you have an internal class representing a low-level data structure with several hundred fields!). I’m rather speaking of naming conventions, order of members, and some other stuff related to the appearance of a class.
A Bit More About Nemerle and Functions
After posting my first impression about Nemerle I noticed that I had been criticized by some community members for my superficial knowledge of the language and related concepts. I like constructive criticism and I do accept it; so I’m thankful to those guys for pointing me to that.
However, I’d like to note I didn’t try to pose as an expert. I only expressed my current understanding of the language and I advisedly highlighted that in the post.
AWesome!
So we have almost finished another major release of Aspose.Words. We’re happy to note how greatly the component evolves and improves despite it’s still pretty young by the standards of software industry. It’s less than 3 years old but it’s already the subject to imitate
Among other cool features, two highly requested formats have been added to the component’s arsenal, Rich Text Format (RTF) and WordprocessingML (WordML). One of the areas I’m responsible for is RTF export (will start working on import once we release 4.
Nemerle: The Mage''s Language
Nemmerle is the name of a mage from Ursula K. Le Guin’s book “A Wizard of Earthsea”. I don’t know whether it’s a fairy trick of his but Nemerle now seems to be one of the most popular among the family of “alternative” .NET languages and its popularity is growing. I haven’t had a chance to explore it in-depth but from what I’ve learnt so far I can confidently state I like it!
Download Cache Problem
Just have eliminated a bug (I think it’s a bug indeed!) that was really hard to pinpoint. After doing a fresh checkout I added some new code, built the solution and ran NUnit as usual. It amazed me that no code changes reflected in the tests. Rebuilding the solution didn’t give any effect. OK, I removed the \bin and \obj subdirs from the project to avoid possible copying of the old assembly that still didn’t contain the changes and built the solution again.
How to Make Your Teammates Happy
I’m sure there are a number of funny “guides” for programmers over the Web – collections of derisive rules that should NEVER be followed. At least I’ve seen a pretty comprehensive guide that shows how to write unmaintainable code in Java. Anyway, this inspired me to design a list of helpful hints intended for .NET (and not only .NET) developers who desire to obtain recognition in their teams It’s far from being that comprehensive (after all, it’s just a blog post), yet I would expand this list with great pleasure.
WinFX is Dead. Meet .NET 3.0
While many of you haven’t yet migrated to .NET Framework 2.0 due to corporate policy or other reasons (this was shown by a poll we recently conducted on the forums), MS surprised all of us. (Drumroll, please) Meet .NET Framework 3.0, former WinFX! Yes, they decided to rename it that way. Nothing new in functionality, all the technologies are inside (WPF, WCF, WF, and WCS - Windows CardSpace, former InfoCard, yet another name change, though not that revolutionary).
Software Issues Troubleshooting
Just decided to share some small but annoying issues I recently faced on my system as well as the probable ways to resolve. They have to do with several tiny little Microsoft products like Windows XP and its components, Word 2003, and Visual Studio 2003 :) Some of the issues are well known, others are a bit tricky – either way, I hope it will be helpful for people experiencing similar problems and came across this posting.
MS Word and Brown Fox
If you are not aware of this feature, type the following text in a Word document:
=rand()
and hit Enter. Are you surprised? :)
This is not a bug but an undocumented (in the online Help) Word function intended to insert some dummy text. By default, it inserts 3 paragraphs, each containing 5 sentences. Each sentence is “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” which contains every letter in the English alphabet.