In WP8, Microsoft introduced libraries for both Text to Speech and Speech to Text without an active internet connection. But this feature is not available in WP7. I found some article implementing Text to Speech using BING API, but seems it is no more working. Here is one implementation using BING REST API, which helps to integrate text to speech in in you WP7 applications.

Today I got another problem with Excel file opening. One of the my colleague wrote code to generate XLS / XLSX file using OleDb object. And it was working perfectly. Only problem, while opening the XLS / XLSX file, MS Excel was displaying an error like this.

To verify excel installed on my local system; initially I tried using OpenSubKey() method. But it was always returning null, even though I can see the registry key using regedit.exe. I was using a Windows 8, x64 bit OS and the application was developed in VS 2008, Winforms, x86 platform. Later I found the reason - A 32-bit application on a 64-bit OS will be looking at the HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node node by default. To read the 64-bit version of the key, you’ll need to specify the RegistryView enumeration using OpenBaseKey() method.(This API is added in .Net 4.0.) And if you are using .Net 3.5 or below, either you need to build the application using Any CPU or x64 platform target.

Today I faced an issue, I want to open an excel file from a Windows application; before opening the file, I want to verify that MS Excel installed on the system. I found a solution using registry from MSDN.

QR code (abbreviated from Quick Response Code) is the trademark for a type of matrix barcode (or two-dimensional barcode) first designed for the automotive industry in Japan; a barcode is an optically machine-readable label that is attached to an item and that records information related to that item: The information encoded by a QR code may be made up of four standardized types (“modes”) of data (numeric, alphanumeric, byte / binary, Kanji) or, through supported extensions, virtually any type of data. - Wikipedia.

If you have installed mono, mono comes with a web server called XSP. One of my favorite feature of XSP (or mono) is you can right click on any folder and start a website with that folder as the physical path. And if you are downloading lot of sample code and application; every time hosting the application in IIS is a tedious job. Here is a simple Windows Explorer shell extension, which will help you to right click on a folder and Start IIS express (IIS Express, a lightweight version of IIS, is available as a standalone freeware server and may be installed on Windows XP with Service Pack 3 and subsequent versions of Microsoft Windows. IIS 7.5 Express supports only the HTTP and HTTPS protocols. IIS Express can be downloaded separately or as a part of Microsoft WebMatrix.).

Today while publishing a web application I got a strange error like this from Visual Web Developer express.