Develop Reference

How can I convert any audio file to an .ogg in C#?

I'm creating a C# winforms application in Visual Studio, and the user is going to upload any audio file that is then automatically converted to an ogg file and placed in a certain directory.
Are there any DLLs or something similar that can do this conversion? I've visited Alvas.Audio, but I'm going to be distributing this application and that's against their license.
I'm also pretty new to C# programming and pretty much taught it to myself, so I need pretty specific instructions, sorry.
Any help?

Reading from DBF files in C# without a driver

I'm currently writing a C# 4.5 desktop application intended to help troubleshoot an old VPF application. My app is intended to display a list of things that can commonly be broken along with their current status.
A few of the things I need to display are found in the VFP application's databases so I need to be able to read DBase databases. However, I have a few restrictions that make this tricky:
I can't guarantee that any DBF driver has been installed on the system.
My application should run without a separate installer so I can't just toss in the ACE redistributable. (I could install ACE together with the VFP app but I don't want to rely on any part of it being intact, even bundled libraries.)
Is there anything I can bundle with my app that can read VFP databases and doesn't require installation?

I wouldn't want to do this... but you could parse the files yourself.
It looks like someone on github has the same idea.

As Tom said,
You can parse DBF files yourself. Their structures are well documented.
As a side note, ACE has nothing to do with VFP database files and actually ACE cannot read/write DBF files (unless they are old DBF formats). Proper VFP database driver is VFPOLEDB which you can include its setup msi with your application. Using VFPOLEDB would be an easy path.

What is the standard way for dealing with PowerPoint (.PPTX) files on the server?

I've been tasked with a feature that can generate PowerPoint files on the server using C#. I'd basically start with a template, and programmatically replace some text with live data from the database. I've been doing some research into this area for the past day and here's what I've found:
PowerPoint has this sort of thing built in, meaning it can connect to external data sources and pull in data. Most examples of this, I've found, either use PowerPoint automation done on the server (I've been advised against this) or assume a SQL Server backend. Our company uses Oracle for our RDMS needs. Oracle has a solution for this called Oracle BI, but it requires a whole new web server setup to run various Java EE components and what not. I didn't look at the price, but knowing Oracle it's not cheap. It also requires new software to be installed on the end user's machine, which we really want to avoid.
Generating PowerPoint files on the fly is possible. The company that is basically the go-to guys for this problem (every help forum points to them, and they get all the rave reviews) is Aspose. They have .NET components for dealing with just about any Office format you can think of. The problem is, they are astronomically expensive. Just the PowerPoint component (a site license for up to 10 developers) would cost $3,995.
The third possibility is generating a solution in-house. After all, a PPTX file is just xml, right? Well, looking closer, a PPTX appears to be a gzip archive. It contains many folders, each containing many XML files. Modifying a PPTX file would, correct me if I'm wrong, entail unzipping the file to a temporary directory, reading the XML file and modifying the contents, then packaging up everything again and write the file out to the response stream. Perhaps there are libraries that can work with gzip streams on the fly without extracting everything.
My Question: Are there easier ways to work with a PPTX file using .NET that don't require working with compressed XML files or buying very expensive software? Basically, we need to modify a PowerPoint file, change some text, and allow the user to download that generated file from a web server.

OpenXML is Microsoft's .Net library that lets you manipulate Office documents. It lets you open a PPTX file and provides an object model that wraps the XML contents.
Here's the link to the OpenXML SDK and the MSDN documentation.
I've used OpenXML to let a ASP.Net page dynamically generate Word documents from a database.

Don't use Office Interop on a web server. It's an all-around bad idea.
If you are only replacing text placeholders for files that will not change, the home grown solution that finds the placeholders in the xml files in the gzip archive should be doable. .Net has had zip support for some time, and it is greatly improved if you are able to use .Net 4.5, so you shouldn't need to extract the archive to a temporary location at all.
PowerPoint should also support connecting directly to Oracle in the same way it supports connecting to Sql Server (just play around with the connection options), without needing the special Oracle BI stuff. However, I'd still prefer the home-grown solution, as this will only work while the powerpoint file is able to reach your database directly, which is typically only possible in your local LAN environment or with an active VPN.
If you want anything fancier than a simple text replacement, perhaps looks for an Aspose competitor.

How to load data from Excel file to sql databse?

I'm developping an application for Honeywell Dolphin 6100, a mobile computer with a barcode scanner that uses Windows CE 5.0 like OS.
I want to import data from excel file to the local database of the application. I'm following this tutoriel
The problem is that the System.Data.OleDb can not be found which is important to read data from an external file.
What I need to do ?
Note: I'm using VS2008 and I'm working on Windows 7.

You have a raft of hurdles to overcome. Just a few are
OLEDB is not supported under Windows CE.
Pocket Excel has no automation object model or even any published file format specification
Desktop libraries (like Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel) will not work under Windows CE
Basically I think you're straying down a poor choice path.
What's the actual business problem you're trying to solve here? Do you have Pocket Excel files created on the device you need to merge into a local SQL Compact Database? Is there an option for not using Excel? Or is it that you have desktop Excel files on a PC and you want the data over on the device? If so, how are the files getting to the device? Can you convert them to CSV? Can you put a service on a server somewhere to do the conversion for you?
There's likely a way to solve the overall problem, just not on the path you're trying. We'd need to understand the actual problem to help you get a better solution, though.

some options:
write a one off console app to do the import.
use SQLserver management studio to do the one off import of an excel file
use microsoft access which will allow you to open the excel file and the DB and query across them both.
Unless you need to have your CE app accessing excel files all the time then maybe its not worth getting it to work just now.

Windows Service to back up Excel File into Database

I have to backup excel file daily and i need that my excel file could automatically upload on SQL server at exact time which i want.
I am new to C# so dont know from where i can get proper help regarding this issue.I have searched in google but confused by many methods and complicated codes etc.
I am much desperate now so please help me out and send me links about this.

Write the windows service in C#.net to achieve this.
Details of Windows Service with sample:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/3990/Simple-Windows-Service-Sample