Aspose Newsletter March 2011

Introducing Rollbase and thoughts on better searches

Hi again. I hope this finds everyone well.

This month we are changing things up slightly. I will be starting with some business related news and then moving onto more general thoughts. Likewise, I will be seeking feedback from the willing for ongoing conversation points in future newsletters.

In business news I would like to introduce the company Rollbase. Rollbase is a cloud development platform for creating business-centric, software as a service (SaaS) applications. What’s better is that the platform is portable; allowing developers to choose between a hosted cloud or a private cloud solution.

Rollbase made it onto my radar because the platform offers native support for Aspose.Words for Java. One can purchase Aspose.Words for Java and enable Rollbase to accept Word document templates for generating business documents on the fly. More information and savings can be found in this blog post on their site.

In general thoughts, this month I’ll be talking about a feature I would love to see in search engines: object searches. Search engines are great when you know what you’re looking for, but what do you do when you have no idea what you’re searching for? As silly as it may sound this happens to me from time-to-time. For example, let’s say you’re working outdoors and spot a plant you do not recognize. How do you find more information on this plant if you do not know its name? Radica games translated the old 20 questions game to a very entertaining game device. Seeing this concept implemented so well I can’t help but wonder why there isn’t a similar “object” search feature, an interface that allows users to identify what they’re seeking by answering common identification questions. One could even integrate the use of pictures for quicker identification.

If you have already seen some form of this please drop us a line. Or, if there are other topics that you would like to discuss please feel free to share those as well.

Many thanks,

Danny Cooper, Aspose Texas Team Leader @aspose

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Product Spotlight – Merging Aspose.Pdf and Aspose.Pdf.Kit

Aspose.Pdf allows developers to create and manipulate PDF documents without using Adobe Acrobat. Aspose.Pdf.Kit allows developers to manage and manipulate existing PDF files, and manage form fields within PDF files. The two products are often used together and have much complementary functionality. We have therefore decided to merge the two products. This benefits our customers by making the product easier to understand and use. We will provide an easy migration path for customers of the existing products to get the new product. The old products will be supported until your software subscription expires.

Technical Article – Working with digital signatures in Aspose.Words for .NET

Aspose.Words gives you access to a documents digital signature (or signatures if it has several) through the DigitalSignatures collection. It is possible to validate one or more signatures in a document as well as to check its security certificate. To learn how to work with digital signatures, read the technical article.

Tutorial Video – Updating Chart Data with OLE Frames using Aspose.Slides

Aspose.Slides lets you create and manipulate Microsoft PowerPoint files in many different ways. This video tutorial shows you how to update a section of a chart from OLE frame data. The process is complete: from how to apply an Aspose.Slides license, open a presentation, select the data to update, updating the data to saving and viewing the resulting presentation. View the video tutorial. The video is just under two minutes long.

Migration Tip – Auto-filtering data with Aspose.Cells and VSTO

Microsoft Excel’s auto-filter feature allows you create a filter on a column, using the values in that column as the filter. It makes it easy to select only pertinent values from a list. When you work in a .NET environment, you can create a spreadsheet, populate it with values and apply an auto-filter programmatically. This migration tip shows how to do this using VSTO and Aspose.Cells, both using C# and VB. Read the migration tip.

New Releases and Updates

1. Aspose.Total for .NET – a compilation of our latest .NET products.
2. Aspose.Words for .NET 9.7.0 – adds access permission to PDF creation and fixes a number of issues.
3. Aspose.Cells for .NET 5.3.0 – enhances conversion features and adds a number of features to Aspose.Cells.GridWeb.
4. Aspose.Pdf for .NET 5.0.0 – fixes a number of issues.
5. Aspose.Slides for .NET 5.0.0 – adds ODP format import and improves chart management.
6. Aspose.Pdf.Kit for .NET 5.3.0 – improves image conversions, text rendering and concatenation.
7. Aspose.BarCode for .NET 3.9.0 – adds four new image management features and fixes and issue.
8. Aspose.Tasks for .NET 3.6.0 – adds three new features, including read write MS Office Project XML.
9. Aspose.Network for .NET 6.1.0. – adds several new features, including support for OST, and fixes a number of issues.
10. Aspose.Total for Java – a compilation of our latest Java products.
11. Aspose.Cells for Java 2.5.1 – adds new features and fixes a number of issues.
12. Aspose.Pdf for Java 2.8.0 – improves HTML to PDF conversion and fixes a number of issues.
13. Aspose.BarCode for Java 2.5.0 – adds auto-wrapping of captions, and SCC-14 generation.
14. Aspose.Total for Reporting Services – a compilation of our latest SSRS products.
15. Aspose.Slides for Reporting Services 3.9.0 – resolves an issue with tables.
16. Aspose.Cells for Reporting Services 1.7.0 – improves conditional formatting, adds tablix report item rendering and a number of fixes.
17. Aspose.Total for JasperReports – a compilation of our latest JasperReport products.
18. Aspose.Slides for JasperReport 1.5.0 – fixes alignment and formatting issues.
19. Aspose.Cells for JasperReports 1.1.1 – improves Microsoft Excel 2007 file parsing.
20. Aspose.Total for SharePoint – a compilation of our latest SharePoint products.
21. Aspose.Cells for SharePoint 2.0.1 – fixes PDF conversion formatting issues.
22. Aspose.Network for SharePoint 1.2.0 – enhances SharePoint email synchronisation.

Discontinued Products

Aspose.Report and Aspose.Flash will be discontinued on 16 March, 2011. Technical support continues to the end of your product subscription period but there will be no further development of these products. To find out more about what this might mean to you, read about discontinued products.