Tuesday, January 20, 2009

.NET FileHelpers Library

I came across this cool and simple .NET library that I bet would be useful to everyone - FileHelpers Library 2.0
Very often, we have tasks where we need to read comma delimited files or fixed lenth files and load them into the database. Though this talk is very straight forward, the FileHelpers Library actually makes this task a breeze. Also the code looks much more clean and maintanable.

API for reading/creating Excel files in Java and .NET

Recently I was trying to find a good library for reading and writing Excel files.
In .NET, there were quite a few alternatives. Given below are 2 blog-links where the author has given a detailed analysis of the libraries.
For .NET, you also have the option of using the COM Excel library thats available if you have Excel(MS Office) installed on your box. But using the Excel COM Interop assembly has performance issues.
For Java, my friend pointed out that an excellent free open-source library is available at BIRT exchange. This library is called "e.Spreadsheet Excel API" and a cursory glance at the sample examples impressed me. The library is simple to use and completely free to use in your commercial applications too.