What's In a Name? A Lot in the Aspose Suite!

Aspose is one of the major component vendors, and famous for creating controls that read and write files in the formats of the Microsoft Office suite. I downloaded the Aspose.Total bundle today and noticed something odd. I didn't recognize the names of the individual products. I recalled mentioning Aspose products in an article a few years ago with names like Aspose.Word, Aspose.Excel and so on. A quick search turned up a review of Aspose.Excel by my MVP colleague Steve C. Orr.

Gosh, I've been out of the loop! The products in the suite now carry the names Aspose.Cells (Excel), Aspose.Slides (PowerPoint), Aspose.Tasks (Project), and Aspose.Words (Word). When did this happen? I found a reference on the Aspose site to updating references in Visual Studio dating back over two years ago.

I have no knowledge of what went on, but my first suspects would be Microsoft's ever-friendly "Internet investigators". These are the legal-beagle sharp-shooters who once went after an MVP because he dared to update and distribute Microsoft's browscap.ini file (used to detect browsers in ASP Classic).

What's in a name? that which we call Aspose
By any other name would sell a suite.

(Sorry about the preceding. I just couldn't resist. Anyway, Aspose makes fine .NET components.)