PPT in Azure

Hi,

We have an application which relies on aspose (slides, cells, and words) which we are porting to the azure cloud.

Our word documents build just fine, but when we try to write out ppt files to a memorystream they throw an out of memory exception. Note the ppts appear to load out just fine, and we successfully manipulate them.

searching your forums I find that this has apparently been discussed, but all the relevant information is located at this private link: which I can’t access.

Can I get some information, like are there any work arounds, or when will a fix be released?

Hi Anthony,

Thanks for your interest in Aspose.Slides.

I have forwarded your request to our development team. They are looking in to the matter and as soon as they respond to me, i will share the information with you.

I really appreciate your patience and am sorry for your inconvenience,

Mudassir,

It has been 5 days since we visited this issue and our client is pressuring us to provide a resolution. Can you please confirm if the developers have validated the issue is reproducible and what they have done to resolve and remove it?

Please advise,

Josh

Hi Josh,

First of all, please accept my apologies for the delayed response as our development team was investigating the specified issue. NullPointer exception in Azure was discussed in another forum thread as well, which is also mentioned by you. The problem that you have specified is not related to Aspose.Slides but a known problem of Azure, which should be fixed by Microsoft Corporation.

We are once again sorry for your inconvenience,

Mudassir,

Thank you for your quick reply. Can you please provide the following information:

  1. Access to the other forum thread for the NullPointer exception as both myself and Anthony do not have access to .

  2. Is this issue currently being worked on by Microsoft? If so, please provide the contact information to us as we/our client would like to chime in and elevate the issue. If not, we will need a correspondent from your team that the Azure Service Desk can work with.

We need to elevate this to Microsoft and get status of their progress on this issue.

Thank you for your assistance,

Josh

Mudassir,

Can you please supply an update on this so that our client can begin reaching out to the appropriate Microsoft contacts?

Thank you,
Josh

Hello Josh,

Please check this extract from the old private thread:

In our initial investigations, this issue looks similar to one posted
at Microsoft Connect as: Bing

Presentation slides without any text (but with images) were successfully
rendered. However, whenever, there is some text on a slide, an “Out of
Memory” Exception is raised. For instance, in the presentation as
provided by you, remove the text on the first slide and try it out on
Windows Azure, you will be able to render the slide without any problem.
So, most probably, this is the problem with Windows Azure as already
reported to Microsoft.

In this particular case exception was thrown when Aspose.Slides renders slides. Also it happens in several other situations. Aspose.Slides should have access to fonts properties for correct text size calculation, ppt/pptx saving, rendering and export. At the moment, System.Drawing.FontFamily.Families and several other related properties and methods don’t work with Azure.

Alcrus,

We followed up with our contact at Microsoft, Eric Golpe, and he stated that he worked directly with some of the Aspose developers on these components and that some of your rebuilds resolved this issue as well. He also mentioned that you would be aware of a hotfix: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/970350

Can you tell me if there is a later version of the Aspose.Slides build that does not receive this issue?

Also, the issue with the FontFamilies, why does our MS Word Generation work with text but PPT does not? Don’t they both use the FontFamilies library?

Thanks,

Josh

Hello Josh,

Yes, we know about the page and hotfix you mentioned but if I’m not mistaken it’s not available for download.

At the moment, the only possible way is write some workaround which won’t use FontFamilies and other related methods. Although it’s rather possible that quality of text size calculation can be reduced in this case. We will reinvestigate this problem and check possibility of good workaround in the next days and will provide additional information for you.

Alexey:

Thanks for your ongoing assistance with this issue.

Josh and Anthony have been working on this issue with Alinean and have referred the problem back to me as a risk for us making our release. They have indicated that without resolution of this issue, we will be unable to release with PowerPoint support.

We have had great success using Aspose’s components and working with you to get outstanding issues resolved. Can you please give me an update as to the progress on this issue? I need to report back to my stakeholders and do not want to go back to them with the message that Aspose is unable to resolve this issue unless I have no choice.

Thanks for your assistance in this matter,

Tom Murphy

CTO / VP Engineering

Alinean, Inc.

Hello Alinean,

Thank you for the patience. At the moment, we are doing additional investigation. It should be finished in a few days and I will post all information here as soon as it will be available. It’s also very important for us to provide solution for the Azure issue because there are many our customers who interested in it.

Alexey:

Do you have a status update on this issue? I understand your desire to be thorough but it has now been over a week with no additional information. I am being heavily pressured by my stakeholders on a regular basis regarding this item and it has halted our QA efforts on the report generation portions of our platform.

I need to communicate status to statkeholders and plan workloads for our QA team so additional feedback / information / timelines would be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

Tom Murphy

Hello Tom,

At the moment, information I have is not very promising. We are writing replacements for unsupported by Azure System.Drawing calls. The problem is the more methods we replace the more new unsupported methods we discover and we can’t be sure that all of them can be replaced easily. We will give exact information in one or two weeks.

There is unconfirmed information that everything should work fine in case Azure will work on .NET 4.0.

Alexey:

I just wanted to check in with you now that it has been a week and see if you had any updated status / timeline which I can communicate to our stakeholders?

Thanks,
Tom Murphy

Hi Tom,

I have requested the development team to provide me with the status of your issue. As soon as I receive any feedback, I will share that with you.

I am sorry for your inconvenience,

Mudassir:

It’s been a week since you requested a status from your development team and I wanted to follow up and find out what you have received as far as a status and delivery date. The original estimate from your team was 1 to 2 weeks. Since it is now over 2 weeks, I am hopeful that the team is close to releasing a solution.

Part of our development process (and ultimately our platform regression test and deployment) are blocked due to this issue and we really need to have soem idea of when this will be available so we can plan accordingly and update our stakeholders with a deliver date.

Thanks,

Tom Murphy

Hello Tom,

Yes, we are close to the finish but it doesn’t work yet. Most probably it will take some additional time. You will be notified as soon as new version will be available

Alexey:

Any more information? It’s been almost another two weeks and we are now into June and I am having a real tough time holding my stakeholders off without a firm date to communicate. I am being asked to start looking for other options for providing this functionality instead of the Aspose component.

We have been using the Aspose components for a while now (both Java and .NET) and we have achieved significant success using your components. However, at this point, I really do not have any information to use to continue this fight.

Thanks,
Tom Murphy

Hello Tom,

It almost works now but still have several problems which should be fixed before release. I hope new Azure compatible version will be available at the end of this week. I’m sorry for delay and thank you for the patience.

Hello Tom,

Please try attached Aspose.Slides version. It should work fine with Azure now. We tested all standard presentation management operations, slides rendering and export to PDF. Please contact me in case of any additional Azure problems.