April 2003 - Posts

• Datasets and encoding...how do I do it ?

  I am writing an application that stores information in a dataset and then serializes it to an xml file. Every month the serialized data is emailed to a Exchange public folder. In some ways it is an asynchronous xml web services. I am working in Switzerland which means people use umlauts where writing e.g. ä or ü or ö. Everything works well on the local machine because the serialized xml file is stored as unicode. However, the encoding is not specified in the xml declaration as it should i.e. <?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?> is used and not <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-16" ?> Which is a pain later on as I am inserting the serialized data into the body of mail message rather than attaching it.  Whether that is the sensible approach is another question but I am surprised that as a default that datasets are not saved with the correct encoding set. The question is how do serialize the dataset so that it specifies the encoding ? Posted Apr 14 2003, 05:45 PM by MartinSp with 2 comment(s)

• Out of touch with reality

  A site dedicated to a man  whose grip on reality seems to be about the same as Scott McNealy. I suppose this is the beauty of the web, have a funny idea and all the world can come and see the result. http://64.39.15.171 Posted Apr 11 2003, 09:25 PM by MartinSp with 1 comment(s)

• I hope this is not true : Infopath should be more freely available

  I thought this article was interesting but I hope this statement is incorrect : http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,993289,00.asp "The other new application Microsoft has been developing as part of the Office System family of products, InfoPath, is also expected to be made available only to those large customers who have a volume licensing agreement with the company as part of the Professional Enterprise release. " Infopath is a great developer tool and client tool for web services. The equivalent tool from Altova is free. Why not make Infopath a standalone tool, free Office addin or package it with Visual Studio ? As a developer I want to use Infopath, why limit it to big customers ? This seems ridiculous to me. Update. It appears that Infopath will also be available as a standalone application http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/newsroom/office/factsheet/OfficeSKUFS.asp Thanks Mike Gunderloy http://www.larkware.com/ Posted Apr 02 2003, 08:09 PM by MartinSp with 3 comment(s)