I'm just wondering if there are any plans to support XLSX files in the .NET 2.0 version of FlexCel?
I know the problem is due to the zip compression, we've worked around this by including winbase which is the only dependency from the .NET 3.5 to actually get the thing working, but it'd be really nice if it would just work with .NET 2.0 as it's much more difficult to reference 3.5 assemblies in a 2.0 DLL with the newer versions of visual studio.
No, support for .net 2 is not currently planned, given the very little demand for it, the work that it would imply to support it, and the fact that .net 3.5 is just .net 2.0 with added libraries. As you have said, you can just make it work by copying the missing dlls from .net 3.5, but what's the point? Why not just install .NET 3.5 which will install of of those dlls? (btw, while not 100% sure, I think Excel 2007 does install .net 3, so if you want support for Excel 2007, you most likely have .net 3 installed anyway)
There is a chance that support might be coming, but it is not because .NET 2.0, but because silverlight doesn't have those compression units either (I sometimes can't understand microsoft, it took them 3 major versions to have something as basic as zip support in .NET, and they go and remove it again from silverlight) and also because Mono support for that library is buggy. So we might end up writing our own library for it(That is something I really want to avoid, I prefer to focus in the other things). But this is something we haven't decided yet. If we do end up writing it, then it will of course be available for .net 2, but I am not sure we will go through it.
No problem, I understand. Maybe you want to take a look at some free libraries out there, we use Ionic.Zip which seems to work great and is incredibly easy, maybe it'll work for you too http://dotnetzip.codeplex.com/ .
I don't believe Excel 2007 does install .NET 3.0. Unfortunately due to our deployment environment we simply can't use anything other than .NET 2.0, we're restricted by our customers :(