PDF Documents in ASP.NET

I needed to write a system which would take a system defined number of images from a database and present them in a well structured PDF document.

This was the first time I had looked at creating PDF documents on the fly in an ASP system without being able to render the contents into HTML first and then simply using a print driver to create the document for me.

My first stop was the Internet to see if there were any PDF DOM utilities out there for .NET. As you might expect this was not the first time anyone had tried to do this and as a result I found a plethora of systems which looked like they might fit the bill. On further investigation however, many of the candidates seemed to only have limited functionality with respect to image manipulation and supported formats. In short, after a few hours of trawling through the specifications and technical documentation of these solutions I plumped for PDF Sharp

PDF Sharp turned out to be a fantastic piece of kit which had excellent support for image and document manipulation and the documentation was as complete as you could want. I had a working system within half a day and the reporting module was totally finished within 2 days.

Awesome.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer takes a serious blow from Mozilla's Firefox browser.

Figures released recently by onestat.com have shown that Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) web browser is finally starting to lose its strangle hold on the internet. Mozilla's Firefox browser has gained 1.14% of global internet usage since May 2006 with IE loosing 2.12% in the same period. Could this be the time for every web developer to start looking forward to developing W3C standard applications without having to worry if the site will look the same in IE?

It seems that Firefox is making significant inroads on some of the biggest internet markets in the world too. In the USA (the biggest single internet market) IE usage has slipped below 80% to 79.8% with Firefox rising to 15.82% of the market share. None too shabby for a product only released a year and a half ago and the trend seems to be being repeated all over the world. In Germany, Firefox is now a serious challenger for market leadership, with 39.02% market share compared with 55.99% for IE.

I'm confident that this trend will continue as well. The new version of IE (7.0) boasts all sorts of things such as tabbed browsing and W3C compliance. However, Firefox already has tabbed browsing and it works much better than the offering in IE 7. Also, the W3C compliance in IE 7 comes with caveats which seem to hark back to the previous version's shortcomings. Not that Firefox is perfect, but it's a vastly superior implementation of the standards!

Now with Firefox 2.0 in beta with a feature list as long as the road to nowhere, I am really looking forward to seeing whether or not Microsoft have the ability to compete with this truly awesome browser.

Just as an aside. This is a very amusing article on the joys of using IE instead of Firefox.