June 2003 - Posts
Chris Sells just mentioned that the PDC is now open for registeration.
I'll be there.
DonXML
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.
DonXML
Applied XML Developers Conference 2003 West
applied topics for xml & web service zealots
july 10-11, 2003, greater portland, oregon
[Listening to: Spirt Of The Radio - Rush ]
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.
DonXML
[Listening to: You Wanna Get Me High - The Donnas ]
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.
So if you don’t already know XML, don’t let pictures like Ken Sall’s intimidate you from learning it. It’s not really has hard as some people say it is. Start with DB’s “kernel” specifications and then work in some of the other specs on the map. In reality XML is a lot easier to learn than HTML is, and look how many non-technical people code with HTML everyday.
Don XML
[Listening to: The Saddest Song - The Ataris ]
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:
// Disable all stylesheets
var i, a, main;
for(i=0; (a = document.getElementsByTagName("link")[i]); i++)
if(a.getAttribute("rel").indexOf("style") != -1)
a.disabled = true;
// Add new screen stylesheet
var h = document.getElementsByTagName("head");
var ss = document.createElement("link");
ss.setAttribute("rel", "stylesheet");
ss.setAttribute("type", "text/css");
ss.setAttribute("href", "http://www.yoursite.com/css/blog.css");
ss.setAttribute("media","screen");
if (h[0] != null) h[0].appendChild(ss);
// Add new print stylesheet
ss = document.createElement("link");
ss.setAttribute("rel", "stylesheet");
ss.setAttribute("type", "text/css");
ss.setAttribute("href", "http://www.yoursite.com/css/blogprint.css");
ss.setAttribute("media","print");
if (h[0] != null) h[0].appendChild(ss);
All I did is add the media attribute to the original script and set it to “screen”, and then added a second CSS, with a media attribute set to “print”. In the second CSS, you want to set the display CSS attribute to none for things like leftcontent, rightcontent, leftcolumn, rightcolumn. You will also want to set the margin-left attribute for centercontent and centercolumn to 0em (or whatever units you are using).
DonXML
[Listening to: Hello From The Gutter - Overkill ]
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:
SharpVectors – get a new site up and running using the Portal Starter Kit. We are tired of using Yahoo Groups for our discussions, and need more content on our site. Hopefully it will be ready for the SVG Open. Things slowing me up are all with the architecture of the Portal Starter Kit. I hate the fact that it uses tables for the layout, and that it doesn’t render XHTML, so I’m trying to “fix” it. Once it is done, I’ll post the updates. The overall architecture of the Portal Kit is much different than I would have done it, which is a plus and a minus. It gives me the opportunity to learn a different way to architect something.
CSS Skin – Like everyone else I’ve been busy developing my own CSS skin for my blog. But besides looking good, I’m trying to get some best practices into it. For one thing, no hard coding of sizes in pixels.
Conferences – I’ve been busy with getting the 3 conference presentations done. 2 are due this week, and a third next week. I’ve got to figure out how much to I want to announce. Specifically, do I want to make a public announcement of the details behind the Xenon Project.
DonXML
Applied XML Developers Conference 2003 West
applied topics for xml & web service zealots
july 10-11, 2003, greater portland, oregon
[Listening to: Up & Go - The Starting Line ]
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.
DonXML
[Listening to: Finale - Anthrax ]
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.
One other thing of interest I found in Dino’s book. If you use the System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand object’s ExecuteXmlReader (for reading SQL2K queries that use For XML), the connection to the DB remains open as long as the XmlReader is open. If you want a disconnected version, use the DataSet object.
DonXML
[Listening to: The Hard Way - Bowling For Soup ]
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.
In the data access layer framework that I developed I had 2 goals in mind, encapsulate the gory details of the data provider that we are using with generic classes, and try to eliminate the need for duplicating code over and over again. One thing that was very repetitive was how we were creating the Parameters for our Command objects. We were looking for a way to eliminate the need for creating a utility class that has a static method for each type of parameter that was input or output from a stored proc. We had about 100 different parameters, and the utility class was looking a bit unwieldy. While talking to one of the developers on the project about the possible applications of attribute based programming he asks if we could use it to solve our problem with the parameter utility class. Sounded perfect to me, so I asked him to give it a shot, and pretty soon we had a much better solution to the utility class problem, plus I thought it was a great way to explain attribute based programming.
If you want to see what we did, I wrote an article detailing it, which you can get here. Since adopting the attribute based programming model we have found several places in our code where the use of meta data would make out code much easier to develop and support. Any time I have pieces of related static data that are more than just name/value pairs, we extend enums with custom attributes so that we can use the simplicity of enums, but have them carry more than 2 pieces of data.
DonXML
[Listening to: Somewhere On Fullerton - Allister ]
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.
DonXML
[Listening to: The Tower - Bruce Dickinson ]
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