We’re proud to present Aspose.Slides for .NET 6.2.0. This product release includes support for exporting presentations to HTML. We have also added support for rendering Arabic character and saving presentations in read only mode. This release further adds support for setting access line format along with formatting support for the category/value axes on charts. Several presentation access and slide cloning issues have been rectified and we’ve improved rendering support, particularly for charts. Finally, this release adds support for using Aspose.Slides in manged Visual C++ environment.

To see a complete list of fixes and to download Aspose.Slides for .NET 6.2.0, please go to the download page.

A couple of weeks ago we explained that we are autoporting Aspose.Slides for .NET to Java to improve both the .NET and Java product. Java users will get a whole host of features they didn’t have before and .NET users will get an improved and more powerful product. In the meanwhile, we’re avoiding adding new features or doing customer-specific developments. We want to complete the autoporting work first so that all our users have the same solid base to work from.

We’ve completed the basic work: the background setup that we need to do before running the first port, the analysis, configuration and structure set-up. After the initial autoporting, we run unit tests on the code (we have over 1000 tests to run) and fix the ones that don’t work. To date, we have over 600 working tests. That’s 60% of the product successfully ported. We’re now working on the remaining 40%.

When Aspose started designing products, we focused on .NET. Some of our .NET products were very popular and we created versions of them for other platforms. We now also support Java, SharePoint, SQL Server Reporting Services and JasperReports. The .NET and Java products are similar in many ways: they are components and APIs that software developers use when creating their own applications.

In 2011, we decided to offer Aspose.Words for Java users the same features that our .NET users had access to. We had two options on how to do this: either, we could manually extend the Java APIs to include the features that the .NET APIs already had, or we could work out a way of automatically porting the .NET APIs to Java. The latter approach saves time and ensures that the two products stay synchronized. So that was the way we decided to work.

The Aspose.Words project was successful and we’ve worked steadily on autoporting our other projects too. We’re currently working on Aspose.Slides.

Aspose.Slides for .NET and Java

Aspose.Slides for .NET is currently at version 6.1. Aspose.Slides for Java sits at 2.9.1. As you can guess from the version differences, the two products are different in many ways:

The autoporting process brings the .NET features across to Java. During the autoporting work we’re also reviewing the code to improve performance, add a few features our customers have asked for and fix a number of issues. The final result will be not just one but two improved products.

The autoporting process

So how do we go about autoporting a product? We work in C# to design the .NET product and have created an in-house utility that translates it, line by line, to Java. We have a number of unit tests that we run to make sure that the two versions of the code produce the same output. Where there are differences, we make changes until the conversion works. It’s a painstaking process but when we’re finished, we can convert the .NET product to Java in seconds. Doing it this way, preparing the code for automatic conversion, is faster than writing the Java product from scratch to include the same features as the .NET product.

To see an example from the Aspose.Word autoporting process, watch this video.

Keeping you up to date

To keep you up to date on our progress, we’ll post updates here every couple of weeks.

We’re please to announce Aspose.Slides for Java 2.9.0. This release is compliant with JDK 1.5 and adds support for picture bullets in PPTX presentations.  However, this is mainly a maintenance release that fixes a number of different issues. We have resolved issues to do with presentation access, as well as table rendering issues and issues with missing border lines relating to saved and cloned presentations.

To see a complete list of fixes and to download Aspose.Slides for Java 2.9.0, please go to the download page.

We are happy to announce the release of Aspose.Slides for JasperReports 1.7.0. This release introduces support for JasperReports 4.5.0. Many of the issues with text wrapping in tables that our customers reported have been resolved in this release. We’ve also improved image rendering in the exported reports.

To see a complete list of fixes and to download Aspose.Slides for JasperReports 1.7.0, please go to the download page.

We are pleased to announce the release of Aspose.Slides for Reporting Services 4.1.0. This release adds support for ReportViewer 2010. This version has also inherited support for support for rendering nested tables in exported presentations. Our users have reported an issue with text getting overlapped from cells and this, as well as an issue with unwanted lines appearing for table borders in exported presentations, has been fixed.

To see a complete list of fixes and to download Aspose.Slides for Reporting Services 4.1.0, please go to the download page.

We have released Aspose.Slides for Java 2.8.2, a hotfix and primarily a maintenance release. This hotfix ensures that presentations generated with Aspose.Slides for Java can be opened in PowerPoint 2007 SP3. Many of slide rendering issues that our customer have reported have been fixed and we have added support for rendering of SmartArt. A number of other issues have been fixed. We have looked at slide cloning and now support embedded videos in cloned presentations. The issue of table borders failing to render in saved or cloned presentation has also been resolved in this hotfix.

To read the complete list of fixes and to download Aspose.Slides for Java 2.8.2, please go to the download page.

We are happy to announce the release of Aspose.Slides for .NET 6.0.0. This release introduces many new features including support for password protecting presentation. Now, you can set the custom colors schemes for the presentation and can also have option to add column for table in PPTX presentations. Many of the presentation rendering issues that our customers have reported around generating slide thumbnails and PDFs have been resolved. Other issues with slide cloning along and presentation access  have also been mitigated in this new release.

To see a complete list of fixes and to download Aspose.Slides for .NET 6.0.0, please go to the download page.

Uses for presentation file formats are becoming increasingly more common in todays line of business applications. Over the past year we’ve seen a large increase in the number of Java customers wanting to include presentation file output within their applications – and of course when they have a file format requirement the first place they come is Aspose.

Our Java customers are asking for the full feature set (WordArt functionality, better text effect support, complex thumbnail production etc) of our Aspose.Slides for .NET product to be available in Java version of the product. While this is not an overnight process, we always listen and are happy to help our customers.

Autoporting work for Aspose.Slides will start during February 2012 and we will be providing regular updates on the autoporting progress here on our blog similar to how we did with the Aspose.Words autoporting project, out aim is to keep you fully informed so you can make your own plans around the project.

To ensure the best progress is made in the most reasonable timescale we will only be offering access to our free support service while we are working on this project, Enhanced Support will not be available on the Aspose.Slides Product Family products during this time.

If you have any questions in the meantime please contact us for more information.

We have releases Aspose.Slides for Java 2.7.0. This is a maintenance release and is much stable version as compared to its predecessor. Many presentation rendering issues like improper characters, missing titles, skewed and cropped images, missing background and missing tables in generated PDF/thumbnails have been resolved. Some of presentation access issues along with slide cloning problems have also been addressed in this new release.

In order to view a complete list of fixes and to download Aspose.Slides for Java 2.7.0, please go to the download page.