Archives
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Register For The PDC NOW!!!
Chris Sells just mentioned that the PDC is now open for registeration.
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Applied XML DevConf. Message Board
Chris mentions that the Applied XML DevCon Message Board on GDN has been heating up. I don’t know if I’d call it heating up, but if you are going to the conference, stop by the board and say hi. There has been some discussion about doing something Wed. night, so you may want to chime in with your ideas. I’ll be staying Friday night, too, so if anyone has ideas for Friday, let the group know.
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Whidbey XML Tools Preview @ Applied XMLDevCon
I don’t know how we all missed this announcement from Chris Sells, but it seems that at least some of the Whidbey’s XML Tools will be previewed at the Applied XML DevCon. Rumor has it that there is only a couple seats left, but if Chris gets enough requests he might move the conference to a bigger room.
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Big Picture of XML Family of Specifications
Don Box pointed out a site by Ken Sall that has a map of all major XML technical specifications. DB then goes on to say “XML in its entirety had become more complex than COM ever was.”, and then goes on to describe his ruff XML “kernel”. The problem I have with Ken Sall’s map is that it is very misleading, and can be used to portray XML as being very complex and hard to learn. The map includes, not just the core XML specs, but all other specs built on top of it, plus a bunch of specs that are not XML, but are used by specs based on XML. In the end, it is just a lot of FUD. If I were to do an equivalent map of the COM interfaces and include every major component built on COM, it would say the say thing that the XML map does, that XML (and COM) is everywhere.
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CSS Skin Enhancements
With most folks on weblogs.asp.net now skinning their blogs using CSS, I finally added mine to the list, plus updated the script to include a separate CSS for printing. This way, if by chance someone actually wants to print a blog, they don’t have to get all the extra navigation elements too. Here’s the new script:
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Status Update
I know I haven’t posted a blog entry in a couple days, and nothing really cool since the Extending Enums stuff, but I’m still here. I’m pretty busy ith work and family life, and to quite honest, I haven’t thought of anything cool to blog about. Here’s a couple of the things I am working on:
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SVG on the Front Page of MSDN Magazine
Check it out, an article on SVG in the July Issue of MSDN Magazine. It hasn’t been released to the web yet, but I highly recommend reading Dennis Forbes’ article on Vector Graphics. I only wish that he knew about the SharpVectorGraphics project before he wrote the article. It would have been great to be able to point readers to a .Net implementation of the SVG spec. I’ve tried emailing Dennis and tell him about SharpVectors, but haven’t heard back yet. I’m sure with all the publicity he was swamped with emails.
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SQLXML Data Provider Tips
In case you haven’t heard, the SQLXML .Net managed provider is built on top of OleDb, so unless you absolutely need to use SQL2K’s XML templates and server-side XPath queries I’d recommend staying away from the SQLXML .Net provider. For some reason I never noticed this little fact until I was re-reading Dino Esposito’s Applied XML Programming for Microsoft .Net. I double checked the newsgroups, and sure enough, the SQLXML managed classes are just wrappers for SQLXMLOLEDB. I never liked the fact that a bunch of the XML enhancements to SQL Server 2K were not in the SQL Server DB engine, and where in IIS instead. I know that Oracle does a similar thing, but I didn’t like it when it came out, and I still don’t like it now. And there doesn’t seem to be any plans to update the SQLXML provider until Yukon.
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Fun with Attribute Based Programming – Extending Enumerations
It seems that a lot of people have heard about attribute based programming, but never really get a chance to use it. I started a thread over on GDN looking for different things people have done with it, but to my surprise most haven’t added it to their set of tools. So I was asked to document one of the ways that I use attribute based programming.
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Recentralizing IT
I know that the majority of readers are developers, but sometimes it is good to look around and check out some IT management articles. I subscribe to the quarterly McKinsey Reports, and they usually have one article on IT management trends. This quarter’s article focuses on Recentralizing IT. It’s a good read, especially in light of the previous Longhorn discussions I’ve had.
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re: MSDN Subscription Renewal
Matthew Nolton reminded me that I never followed up on what happened with my MSDN Subscription Renewal. I wound up purchasing a license from vLane, via their eBay auction (it was a couple bucks cheaper from their eBay auction versus the price on their site). It went really smooth. I was wondering how I was going to pay because I bought thru eBay, but all they did is give me a discount number to enter into their site. After about 72 hours, I still hadn’t received an email from MSDN, so I gave them a call, and seems that MSDN has some problems with emails and renewals, you might not always get one. But they did confirm that I was good thru next year, and later that day I got an email from MSDN welcoming me. Funny thing is that even later in the day, I got another from MSDN reminding me that my license was going to expire the end of the month. I logged into the MSDN Subscription site without a problem on the 1st, so everything looks good.
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SAS and .Net
Well, I’m not at TechEd this year, but home and busy working. The current project at the moment is trying to abstract out SAS and make it look and act like a regular data provider. For those of you that don’t have to interop with SAS, consider yourself lucky. It’s about the most closed, prominent, business software that I can think of. If it wasn’t for the FDA basically requiring Pharmas to use the thing, I can’t see how they would ever be able to stay in business. Not that it is a bad piece of software, it just does not play well with others. As long as you stay in the SAS world, it is fine, but to try to integrate it into another platform and you are in for trouble. So, to remove most of the development related issues, I’m busy trying to make it look like a regular data provider to the .Net developer. This means creating Connection, Command, Parameter, and DataAdpater classes that inherit from the base System.Data interfaces, and then implementing all the interop code. These classes are then abstracted again by my Data Access Layer, so that the business object developers don’t need to learn specific data providers. After I get this done, I’ll eventually create a web service wrapper for the DAL so that even non .Net developers can work with SAS, and not have to learn how to handle the interop.