Random Rants & Raves

Nope, this is not about us installing a new build of MS Office 2010. We have moved our company office from Sushant Towers in Sector 56 to a new location. Our office address now is:

Enterprise InfoTech
311, 3rd Floor,
F-Block Market,
South City II,
Gurgaon, Haryana – 122002

We still have a lot of organizing and cleanup to do which should take most of today.

Recently I had to write some code as a sample to be able to display Word and Acrobat files on a Web page in a 2-page view. We couldn’t simply use a plugin or application on the user’s machine to do so. The solution was to export each page out to an image and then display the pages in any way we needed. We therefore needed to do some document export code from our application.

Word to Images

Converting Word files (.DOC & .DOCX) to images was fairly simple, although I do think I probably took a longer approach. The problem is that the older DOC format and the newer DOCX format have different APIs to work with. So instead of doing this, I simply exported them both to XPS and then used the XPS API to retrieve images for each page. This last part was not obvious to me till I found the one line of code required to do this on a forum – I apologize for not linking to this as I can’t find that link anymore. The credit for that part is wholly the original author’s.

PDF to Images

Converting PDF to images was a major issue. There is no direct way of doing this. There are many 3rd party components that are available to do this, but most of them cost a bomb. Some free ones like PDFSharp are able to iterate pages but there is no way to export a complete page to an image without walking through the entire structure of the page and redrawing everything.

This is where I found the GFLAX library. This requires GhostScript for Windows to be installed on the machine as well. You can register the DLL and then reference it in your .NET code.

Code Sample

I’m attaching the entire code sample to this post as a download. The code is released with the open source BSD license. All external components (Word and Office interop assemblies, GFL, etc.) have the copyright of their owners and must be adhered to.

Usage

Once you download the attachment and extract it, open it in Visual Studio 2008. Make sure you’ve installed GhostScript from the link above and run a “regsvr32 GFLAX.dll” for the GFLAX Library. Add reference to Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word on your machine (and remove the marked lines from Web.config) from the .NET tab and to GFLAX from the COM tab.

Run the application and upload .doc, .docx and .pdf files and you can then view them in the browser directly.

 
Two page display of an uploaded Word file. Works with PDF files too.

NDTV is probably India’s leading TV news channel with a bevy of different content channels. Gadget Guru is their extremely popular tech show that airs on NDTV Profit (the business channel) and NDTV 24x7 (the English news channel).

I was invited to be a panelist on a showdown between Windows 7 and Snow Leopard. The hosts – Vikram Chandra and Rajeev Makhni – each took one side (Mac OS and Win7 respectively). The panelists were Kishore Bhargava, Prasanto Kumar Roy and myself in front of a live audience.

The show was taped on Oct 20th and was great fun. You can’t imagine the amount of chaos surrounding an unscripted TV show. All of us had a good time and there was a lot of leg pulling on both sides. The show was broadcast on NDTV Profit on Oct 21st and will be re-telecast on NDTV 24x7 on Oct 25th at 6:30PM.

The telecast show had a lot of stuff edited out. Hopefully NDTV will release the other parts of the show on the Web. Till then you can catch an even more edited set of videos from this below (courtesy YouTube and Tubaah).

We normally use what are called TrueType fonts on Windows machines for everything – whether in applications or when typing a document in Word. However, Windows Vista and above have had a new type of font system called OpenType.

OpenType is a scalable font format, built to be compatible with TrueType, but having many advanced typographic features like:

• Ligatures
• Numeric styling
• Fraction Styling
• Glyphs
• Style “sets”
• Contextual Alternates

You can read about the full specification of features here. However, the strange part has been that you couldn’t use the OpenType features in your Word documents… That is, till now. Word 2010 does have the ability to use the OpenType features in any document.

To do this, you will need to use an OpenType font. Some of these are Calibri, Cambria and the other “C”-fonts. But to really see the power of OpenType you need to use Gabriola. This is a script like font that has a number of cool features to it. Open Word 2010, change the font to Gabriola and add some text to the document. At first glance, the text looks pretty normal.

Select the text and press <Ctrl>-D to enter the font properties dialog. Click on the Advanced tab to reach the OpenType settings. The easiest way to see the changes is to change the “Stylistic sets” value. Change it to say “5” for now and see what happens:

You can now see that there are some nice effects starting to show up. Crank up the value to say 7.

The text effects become even more pronounced. You can also experiment with the other settings to see other features of the font. For instance, the Number forms for “Lining” and “OldStyle” change how numbers are shown like this:

The Contextual Alternates allow you to let characters change according to their relative position to other characters around them. Take a look at the “D” in the word “different” being typed below:

As you can see, the way that the character “d” is drawn changes each time surrounding characters change. You can turn this off or on if you want.

There are a ton of other features available in OpenType fonts as well and combinations of the settings can help you create extremely rich looking typography.

Do try out the OpenType features and with different fonts to see the effect of all the different settings you can do on them. You can add a ton of richness to your documents this way.

Here’s a small tip: If you’re using Outlook 2010, you can use these features when creating a new mail as well!

Yesterday Microsoft made an announcement that has extremely important implications if you are into Web application development. The WebsiteSpark program offers a ton of Microsoft software for free for web developers and web development companies that qualify. You get all these software for 3 years for both development and production usage. The list of software is:

• 3 licenses of Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
• 1 license of Expression Studio 3
• 2 licenses of Expression Web 3
• 4 processor licenses of Windows Web Server 2008 R2
• 4 processor licenses of SQL Server 2008 Web Edition
• DotNetPanel control panel

You can read more about the program on Scott Guthrie’s blog post and at the main site.

What I want to explore in this post is what it means for Web development in general. Currently, there is a trend or impression that if you need to create a software for a SME, you need to use the LAMP stack to remain competitive cost-wise. While true to some extent, what you do lose out is in terms of productivity and time-to-market with tools such as VS2008 and the Expression suite. But the cost of entry to use these has often been a pitfall to getting individual Web developers or smaller Web project companies as well as for the SME.

With WebsiteSpark this so-called “advantage” of the LAMP stack goes for a toss. Not only do you get all the tools you need for free for developing projects for SME companies you also get a number of other additional options that help ease your development, such as:

• The Web Application Toolkits: A set of pre-packaged templates, samples, source code, etc. that can be simply plugged into your site to extend it with some extra features.
• The Web Platform Installer: Allows you to quickly set up a developer or even production machine with not just the base requirements but also a number of free Web Applications such as WordPress, Umbraco, SugarDRM, DotNetNuke, Moodle etc. by simply following the setup prompts. Take a look at the Web Application Gallery and see how easy it is to setup these without having to mess around with configuration files and database connection settings on Windows.

This basically means that setting up and using Windows as a platform for Web application development not only is easier and faster but also is now available for free! You can also run most of the open source Web apps on Windows with better performance and scalability. So is there any real reason to still go for the LAMP stack? Try the above stuff out and then decide.

One of the cool new features of PowerPoint 2010 is the ability for you to broadcast your presentation over the Internet for remote or networked viewers. This allows you to show presentations even if there is no projector available.

More...

I really liked the blog post by Bill Evjen regarding some of his favorite desktop gadgets. I’ve been using a bunch of gadgets since Vista days and I continue to use them here. Here’s my list of gadgets on the desktop:

Large Notes Gadget: This is a modification of the built-in Notes gadget available in Vista (but not in Win7). It allows you  to quickly write a sticky note on the screen and also increase the size of the note. I know Windows 7 has a built in Sticky Notes application, but I like my desktop to be clean and this fits the bill perfectly. Just remember to click the “English” link at the top to view the site in English when you go to download the gadget.

I also use the built in Weather and Currency gadgets with settings for my city and country. I find this quite sufficient for my needs. The good part is that these gadgets are  now enhanced in Windows 7 and have a large mode as well for looking at multiple days of weather or multiple currencies at a time.

System Monitor is the next gadget I use. It’s a combo gadget which shows a multi-CPU monitor, a memory monitor, date & time, notebook battery level, wireless strength and IP address. It also has useful tools like ping, traceroute and whois as well!

Another gadget from the same company is the Quick Launch gadget. This allows me to store shortcuts to apps that I use occasionally but are not “installed” normally. For instance, I have moved the Recycle bin off my desktop to this gadget as well as quick clicks to my C and D drives. I also have “portable apps” such as WinSCP, FireFox 3.5.2 and MS FTM that I use occasionally but are not in my Start Menu.

Next is “The Region” Gadget which allows me to see the latest featured posts from TheRegion.com – the blog aggregation space for Microsoft Regional Directors. It’s good to see what some of the top experts in the Microsoft technology space are talking about and i’m honored and humbled to be in this same list!

Since I’m on a 17” notebook running at 1920x1200 i have a bunch of more space that I occasionally try out some other gadgets in the space available. But the above ones are some that I use all the time.

Once it finally hit MSDN Subscriptions, I downloaded Windows 7 and went around installing it. One of the things I did differently this time is that instead of burning the ISO to a DVD and then booting my machine off it, I created a USB drive based install following these steps:

1. Plug in your USB drive (thumb, hard disk, etc.). Must be >= 4GB in size
2. Open a Command Prompt with Admin rights and run the following commands:
• DISKPART
• list disk [This will show a list of disks attached to your system. Note the # for the USB drive]
• select disk # [where # is the number of the USB drive selected above]
• clean
• create partition primary
• active
• format fs=ntfs quick
• assign
• exit
3. Now mount your ISO or open it with WinRAR and copy all the contents from it to the new drive partition
4. Use the USB to boot your machine (if your BIOS supports it) and start the installation

On my 3 year old notebook, the complete installation off the USB drive took just about 18 minutes from start to finish. I highly recommend that you use this technique to get up and running with Windows 7 fast.

Every single device on my machine was detected and drivers installed automatically. It also found the latest official nVidia drivers for my video card from Microsoft Update and downloaded them and installed too. I had a fully working machine in about 30 minutes and have started installing all the software I need. Kudos to the Windows team on getting this so right this time.

PCQuest has just published 3 of my articles in their current issue. It was actually supposed to be 4, but the one on ASP.NET 4 got lost in the mail and a resend was received too late for this issue. You can read these articles here:

• MS Office 2010 Preview
• Silverlight 3 LoB Apps Part I (new series)
• Windows 7 Development Part I (new series)

I’m also going to try and compile a list of articles I’ve written in PCQuest over the last few years and link to them here.