A few years ago, we looked at some open source .net PDF generation tools. It is interesting to look at them again to see which ones are still maintained and which ones are out of maintenance.

There two .net ports of iText, iText.Net and iTextSharp. .iText.Net is still maintained but iTextSharp was out of maintenance. Why? iText.Net is compilation of Java code using J# and thus can catch up the new versions of iText easier. iTextSharp is a C# port with a more ambitious agenda but never realized. J# port has its danger as well; would J# support all future JDK releases?

The other tool I looked at was nfop which is a J# port of fop. Unfortunately, nfop has not been maintained either.

I have encountered this article by Tom Barnaby on FTPOnline at http://www.ftponline.com/reports/vslivesf/2005/barnaby/. It recommends a tool called Rapier-Loom.net at http://www.dcl.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/research/loom/rapier_loom.htm.

The much anticipated enterprise library from Microsoft Pattern and Practice team has been finally released:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/architecture/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnpag2/html/entlib.asp

I am lucky enough to attend a seminar by Hisham Baz at Inland Empire .Net user's group meeting (http://www.iedotnetug.org/). Hisham is a developer of Enterprise Library. His blog points to many other blogs by Enterpise library architects and developers, together providing very useful information.

This is a very interesting project from Washington State University:

http://www.eecs.wsu.edu/paint.net/

Also this article from The Code Project:

http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/PdnNoiseEffect.asp

I was able to installing Suse Linux 9.0 in Microsoft VirtualPC 2004 yesterday. There are a few discussions in Microsoft VirtualPC news group turns out to be helpful. Here are steps that I went through:

1. Download boot CD image boot.iso from ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/9.0
2. Create a new virtual machine in VirtualPC 2004. VirtualPC 2004 no longer provides Linux machine type list. So I picked “Other“ from the list. Then I gave it 128 MB of RAM.
3. Started the new virtual machine. Then capture the boot.ico image as CD-ROM drive. Restarted the machine. Then Linux installer loaded.
4. Before I started ftp installation, I had to manually load the module for tulip/“DEC 12x4x network card“ first. When prompted for tulip parameter, I continued without entering anything. Then I entered my local IP address, subnet mask, DNS addresses as prompted.
5. Then I started installation. I used ftp installation from one of the mirror site. It took 4 hours to download and install all the files over my DSL line. At one point, I though the installation was frozen, but the blinking network light on the VirtualPC window told me otherwise.
6. I had to re-enter the DNS info after the installation was complete. I also changed the resolution from 800 x 600 to 1024 x 768. I kept the advice of VirtualPC news group not to change the color depth from 16 bit.

Suse Linux 9.0 looked more impressive than I expected. The KDE 3.1 desktop is user friendly. The YaST based admin is as friendly as those of Windows'. I thought the Konkerer browser is still weak though. I will give other browsers a shot. The installer failed to detect the SB16 sound card emulated by virtual machine. I will try to configure it manually later.