Excel dll for Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel - asp.net

We want to use Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel in our web application. Everything works fine on our local machines, but on our test machine we're running into problems. It has neither Visual Studio nor Office installed on it.
We're using .NET framework 2.0 and the server is running on Windows Server 2003 with IIS6.
Is there a dll that needs to be installed on the machine or added to the bin of the web application?

You will need to have MS Office and the Office Interop assemblies installed on your server in order for that to work.

I'm pretty sure that you will need to have Office installed on the machine it's runnnig on. At least that's my experience from building desktop apps that uses Office.Interop

Please go through the following URLs for redistribution:
How to make changes in references
Where to get distribution
This may help your suituation. And also according to the distribution page, you also need to install office also.

OpenXML?
I got it working at the moment to create Office 2007/Open Office spreadsheet files.
Point to table
Include column headers - optional parameter
Detect data type - optional parameter
Stream to user or save to file system or save to file system then immediately download.
Outcomes an Excel file with cells that are detected as numbers / strings.

Related

Newbie Trying To Deploy Asp.Net Website

I'm basically wondering what the best way to deploy an Asp.Net Web Site is, mostly from the point of view of security. Right now, I'm trying to publish the website using Visual Studio 2010. Could someone direct me to a good tutorial on how to do this securely? For example, can it be done over an encrypted connection via Visual Studio? Is it necessary to install any software on the server to do this? Should I use a different program to open up an SSL (TLS) connection first, and if so, which program (does it come standard with windows)?
The server is running Windows Server 2008. Development is on Vista.
Many thanks in advance for any direction in this matter!
Andrew
I would publish the site to your local machine and file copy the files across to your test/production environment. As a rule we don't publish sites straight from VS to test or production.
For example you don't want to accidentally push things straight from dev into a live environment do you?
As far as the file transfer security goes you could use SFTP.
Note: First thing is to check with the owner of the server, as they often will provide you an FTP connection and will take care of configuring IIS.
If you want to add security, make a keyfile and sign your assemblies and consider running Dotfuscator on your dlls, the community edition is included in Visual Studio. Here is an earlier question where I've put more info on Dotfuscator.
If you have to do the deployment yourself, here's a few things to consider.
XCopy (easy)
MSI (have to create a setup program, you can do this easily in Visual Studio)
There is no security advantage in deploying using Visual Studio, but you can use Visual Studio to create a small setup program. One thing you want to make sure for security is DO NOT deploy any .cs files. Prepare your files, you should compile in Release mode, make sure debug is not enabled in your config file, keep your bin and it's dll, also the aspx, asmx, ascx, svc, css, js, and config files.
XCopy: Install a small FTP server, or use one your company alreayd has, this will allow you to get your files once you are logged into the target machine. You should be able to get an administrator account for the target machine, just ask the sysadmin of the domain, then log on using remote desktop, got to your ftp site, and download your files. Open IIS on the target machine, create a virtual directory and a pool. Copy your files to the location, configure your connection string to your DB if you use one, then test your website.
MSI: same process as above, except the setup will create the virtual directory and pool for you.
Here is extra info on best practices from the official ASP.Net website.
If you have some control on the server (e.g. to configure IIS7), you might want to look into Microsoft Web Deploy (new product just been released):
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/09/13/automating-deployment-with-microsoft-web-deploy.aspx
Haven't tried it myself, but looks quite slick and it apparently encrypts the data being copied up, so might suit you.

Getting started with SQL Server Reporting Services

I'd like to set up SQL Server Reporting Services but I don't know where to start. The books out there are okay but don't seem to fit what I need to do. That is, I want to set up my ASP.NET 3.5 application to be able to view reports I create, both in a web report viewer and downloadable as PDF/Excel.
What are the basic steps to do this? Do I need IIS installed on the SQL box?
Reporting Services for SQL Server 2005 is built on top of IIS. Reporting Services for SQL Server 2008 is not, but you may still need IIS installed anyway; I seem to remember that the install process checked for IIS as a precondition.
What version of SQL Server are you using? I assume that you have a version with reporting services, but just to verify, the Express editions don't have it. SQL Server developer edition is the cheapest way to go; it's usually available on Amazon for something like $45. Developer edition has everything, but with a restricted license.
I haven't messed with reporting services much (it's on my list, but never seems to get to the top of the list). However, the 2008 version uses Visual Studio 2008 for developing reports (renamed as SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio). Once you have all that installed, you should be good to go.
You can access the SSRS implementation via a SOAP API.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa256607(SQL.80).aspx
This should allow you access to reports via a report viewer which you has built in means for exporting to pdf / excel etc.
Install it from the main SQL Server installer. Make sure you also install the client tools on the machine you'll be using for development.
Use Visual Studio (or BIDS) to create and deploy your reports. There are standard templates to get you started.
When you access the reports over the web, you will have the option of downloading them as PDF or Excel (no special settings or code is required)
Embedding reports in an ASPX page takes a little more work. When you get past the items above, post another question about the details (it mainly involves a couple of special controls).
The ASP.NET ReportViewer control can operarate in two modes, local or remote. In remote mode it will display reports from a SSRS server, in local mode you can add the reports directly to your visual studio project and the control will handle the rendering. This might be more suitable if you don't want to install IIS.
In my experience it is easier to create the reports in remote mode but in local mode you can use business objects as a data source.
Have a look at http://www.gotreportviewer.com, this has a good explanation and links to other resources and sample code.

page is not served because it has been explicitly forbidden - extension .asp may be incorrect

I'm trying to run a test version of a web using the File System (i.e. the "Cassini" web server built-in to Visual Studio 2005) rather than (IIS 5.1 on my Win XP dev PC). This web is a hodge-podge of classic ASP files written years ago and some new development in ASP.NET (VB.NET).
How can I get past this error message as it tries to go to /TestWeb/default.asp? -
Server Error in '/TestWeb' Application.
This type of page is not served.
Description: The type of page you have requested is not served because it has been explicitly forbidden. The extension '.asp' may be incorrect. Please review the URL below and make sure that it is spelled correctly.
Requested URL: /TestWeb/default.asp
Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.3603; ASP.NET Version:2.0.50727.3082
Things I have checked and previously encountered trying to get this mess working:
C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\CONFIG\web.config
(has nothing for *.asp nor
HttpForbiddenHandler so nothing to
comment out).
C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\CONFIG\machine.config
(has nothing for *.asp)
C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\CONFIG\machine.config
(had a HTTPForbiddenHandler for
*.asp but I commented it out as per other postings advice; seemed to
have no effect for me though).
To get past an earlier error
("Request for the permission of type
'System.Web.AspNetHostingPermission'
failed"), I had to go to
"Administrative Tools > MS .Net
Framework 2.0 Configuration > My
Computer> Runtime Security Policy >
change Local Intranet to Full Trust.
To get past an earlier error ("the
network bios command limit has been
reached") I had to "enable a hot
fix" by adding the following DWORD
value at the following registry key:
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\ASP.NET\FCNMode
and set the value to 1 (per MS KB
Article 911272).
This whole web has been placed on a file server in our LAN and from my desktop VStudio2005 views it via the mapped drive letter (e.g. V:\SVNwork\myFolder\TestWeb)
Visual Studio 2005 models this as a "web site" (not a "web application project").
The remainder of this post describes some background about why I am trying this:
We tend to recreate the web site on our dev PC's which run IIS 5.1 on Win XP. Movement of new stuff into production can be awkward using WinDiff and copying files as needed.
I'm trying to implement source control over this work. I've had a heck of a time trying to configure Visual SourceSafe 2005 and local IIS to work together smoothly (interestingly, I had pretty good luck putting "web application projects" under VSS2005 so I think it's related to the awkwardness of the ASP.NET 2.0 "site" model and VSS).
Anyway, I've moved a development version of this classic ASP and ASP.NET to a common file server in our LAN. Before placing this under Subversion control as a working copy of it's equivalent imported into a repository, I just want to make sure it can work with the Cassini web server. That's where I am stuck. The ultimate goal is have this under SVN and view differences with TortoiseSVN.
Thanks for reading this far...hopefully someone can get me past this error and then I can move forward with the SVN and TortoiseSVN work.
Cassini doesn't, as far as I can tell, support classic ASP. An alternative would be to run a local install of Apache (since you can't/won't use IIS) which will host ASP, but is probably asking for trouble.
See also: http://blogs.msdn.com/mikhailarkhipov/archive/2005/06/24/432308.aspx
You could also run local IIS, which will, of course, host both ASP.NET and classic ASP. Visual Studio can easily be configured to debug with a local IIS install.
Points for moving to subversion: we use the Microsoft stack (Visual Studio, ASP.NET, SQL Server) with subversion and it works very well.
Subversion comment
GRRR.. bosses are fun. The svn model is known as copy/modify/merge. The repository lives in a central location - probably your file server. Using the svn client - or a Visual Studio plugin like the excellent AnkhSVN - each developer gets a LOCAL working copy,makes their changes and performs a "commit" when they're done working on a file.
SVN takes care of making sure that developers don't overwrite each others changes, provides a facility for merging changes when someone has modified a file between when you got your last copy and when you commit your changes, etc.
The whole point of a working copy is that it isolates developers from each other. The merge/commit step takes care of intergrating everyones changes. Having a central working copy that everyone works from defeats the purpose.
This is a very different approach than that used by Visual SourceSafe, which is basically a file locking mechanism. The fact that SVN is a real client-server application (where VSS is simply a disk-based "database" with no server app to administer it) provides all sorts of capabilities. We check out, modify, commit, then publish from svn to a dev server.
Also, if I remember correctly, Cassini won't server apps from a mapped drive.

ASP .NET Development Server not serving everything all the time

I'm using Visual Studio 2005 on a Windows XP SP3 machine and recently have come accross a some what strange issue.
I have a C# and ASP.NET project that runs fine when on the team test server and using IIS locally on my own machine. However, running it using the in-built Visual Studio ASP.NET Development server it doesn't seem to serve all the images/scripts/css files all of the time. When I load a page one time images A, B and C will be missing and I may get a system (sub-package) error however loading it again all those images will be there and the sub-package will work but a CSS, a script or any other image file may be missing.
The Windows event application log seems to show occasionally the missing files will be logged but this isn't consistent either.
It happens to me all the time; I think the reason is that the ASP.NET Develoment server is not a very good HTTP server, and when receiveing too many requests, it drops some ones.
Since it is also very very slow, I configured vs2008 (you can do that with vs2005, of course) to use ASP.NET for debugging; it works far better that way.
To do that:
Project -> properties -> Web (last tab) -> Server. There are three alternatives: Use Visual Studio Development Server; Use local Web IIS; Use custom Web server. Choose the second. (not sure about the exact english names: I have the Italian version of VS).
Check the page in Firefox/Firebug or with IE8 and see if the paths to the files/scripts/images is correct or not. A common problem when switching between the local dev webserver and IIS hosted pages is that the paths may not resolve the same. You can fix this sometimes by using the "~" character before a path in the asp code.

How can i have two concurrent web apps running on VS2008/VSS8.0/ASP.NET/IIS for a trunk and branch version?

Applications I am using:
Visual Studio 2008 (C#/ASP.NET)
Visual Source Safe 8.0
IIS 5.1
I have two Web Apps both named the same but one is used for major releases and the other is for minor (trunk and branch). I am wondering if there is an option in Visual Studio that prevents it from creating an ASP.NET app in IIS using the web app's project name. Since both of them are named the same I have to go into IIS and change the path of the application so that it point to the major (or minor) folder when i go between the two.
What I would like to do is have something like this:
http://localhost/webapp_major
http://localhost/webapp_minor
but the web projects still have the same name. I know I can go into the properties of the each project file and have them point to different places but I think that breaks something when you want to merge between the two.
Any Ideas would be very appreciated.
Instead of having HTTP based projects in your visual studio solution, add them as file projects, where the website will be accessed as c:\inetput\wwwroot\major_version (for example) in visual studio (and not http://localhost). That way you can have any kind of setup you want in IIS and your projects won't conflict when you merge them.
Your web application project will let you name the Virtual Directory anything you want. VS2008 extends this by allowing you to set this on a per-user basis, so this information won't be saved in the project file, and therefore won't be propagated to source control.
You can manually create a new web application in IIS and let it point to your working directory. Visual Studio should honor these settings.

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