XML

1 of 4873 | Converting XML Schemas to Schematron (#14): beta available - The beta release of my open source XML Schema validator is available now, from Schematron.com. ...

2 of 4873 | Open Virtualization Format (OVF) Version 1.0 Published as a DMTF Standard - Distributed Management Task Force has published "Open Virtualization Format Specification v1.0 as a DMTF Standard. OVF describes an open, secure, portable, and extensible format for packaging and distribution of software to be run in virtual machines. OVF uses XML for capturing metadata about virtual appliances. Packaging virtual appliances in OVF independent software allows vendors to create pre-packaged appliances that run on any virtualization platform....

3 of 4873 | Rhode Island .Net User Group Dec. 5th - I'm making my first INETA speaking gig on Wed. Dec. 5th, up at the Rhode Island User Group.  The topic will in LINQ (what else?) An Intro to the One Query Syntax to Rule Them All – LINQ An introduction to the new standard query syntax (LINQ) added to C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 9.0.  LINQ is much more than just LINQ to SQL, and in this session we will dispel the belief that LINQ is LINQ to SQL (and that LINQ to SQL is evil).  We will cover the basics of how to use LINQ with in memory collections, how to build your own query providers, and explore to 2 of the built in providers, LINQ to SQL and LINQ to XML. The idea behind the talk is to give the anti-LINQ talk.  Most LINQ ......

4 of 4873 | The Women of XML - I've long been a fan of Lady Ada Augusta Lovelace. She was not only one of Charles Babbage's biggest patrons, but she also was one of the first to suggest the use of "Jacquard Loom" type cards as a way of programming the Analytical Engine as well providing what may have been the first software programs. Lovelace, the daughter of the infamous poet Lord Byron, was also herself a "free spirit", albeit one with an astonishingly brilliant intellect behind it. ...

5 of 4873 | Unit testing and data access - Something that has come up in conversation recently wrt unit testing is the subject of how to unit test complex code fragments that use data persistence code, without having to interfere with source databases / reset data etc. It would be great to be able to test the code with 'static' data that is known to be correct (or incorrect if testing exceptions) that passes through the DAL, but does not require 'real' data access (e.g. you might want to unit test a business component method that internally calls the GetMyObject() method).My current DAL technique of choice turns out to have a nice side effect in making this possible. I tend to start development by creating an abstract data layer wit......

6 of 4873 | VSLive San Francisco Workshop - LINQ - One Query Syntax To Rule Them All - Since I'm talking about conferences, I should also mention that I'll be giving a full day pre-conference workshop, LINQ — One Query Syntax to Rule Them All at VSLive! San Francisco 2008: By now you have probably already heard about LINQ and think it is all about querying SQL Server. Well, yes, with LINQ to SQL you can query SQL Server. But, LINQ is so much more. LINQ extends both C# and Visual Basic with native language syntax for queries, provides class libraries to take advantage of these capabilities, and you can even write your own query provider. In this workshop will cover the basics of how to use LINQ with in memory collections and the language constructs that make LINQ pos......

7 of 4873 | W3C XML Security Working Group Invites Public Review of New Working Drafts - The W3C XML Security Working Group has published eight (First Public) Working Drafts for review, including "XML Signature 1.1" and "XML Encryption 1.1". Members of the WG would appreciate feedback on these documents, with special attention to the algorithms and other proposed changes. In parallel with this v1.1 technical work, the XML Security Working Group is developing requirements and designs for a more radically different version 2 of XML Signature....

8 of 4873 | XML Explicit and SQL receive adapter - Following on from my theme of 'hacking' around the limitations of the various wizards / auto-generated artefacts in BizTalk, here's an excellent posting on how to consume xml produced from SQL Server using XML EXPLICIT rather than XML AUTO.10:22 AM 3/31/2005...

9 of 4873 | XProc: Drupal, XML Pipelines and RESTful Services - Anyone who has used languages such as XSLT should have a pretty fair idea about the complexities involved in treating XML as a programming language itself - it's verbose, forces thinking into a declarative model that can be at odds with the C-based languages currently used by most programmers, can be difficult to read, and as a syntax it doesn't always fit well with the requirements in establishing parameter signatures and related structures. ...

10 of 4873 | Dynamic configuration of MFC menus and toolbars - Dynamic activation of application menus and toolbars through an external XML file....

11 of 4873 | Intergen, Buttercups and Silverlight Accessibility. - It seems fitting with Coldplay being in Auckland last week and Yellow producing a custom version of IE8 that we continue the Yellow theme. Back in December 2006 Forrester released a report titled  Smackdown: Rich Internet Applications Versus HTML We found that, on average, RIAs outperform HTML interfaces; at the same time, RIA usability can fall prey to basic design mistakes. The view that RIA’s are not accessible has continued for some but the W3C is working to change this with the introduction of the Web Accessibility Initiative - Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA)  From the early stages of development of IE8 the team have worked closely with the W3C Web......

12 of 4873 | vstoipad.ps1 - Here’s a downright ugly, but somewhat useful script to generate a ClassificationFormats.xcml file for the Intellipad editor in the Oslo SDK from a *.vssettings file exported from Visual Studio 2008. This should work on a reasonably complete exported Visual Studio color scheme, such as the ones I have posted in the past. param([string]$vsfile, [string]$outdir, [bool]$boldAsItalics = $true)$ns_x = 'http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml'$ns_act = 'clr-namespace:System.ComponentModel.Activation;assembly=Activation'$ns_ls = 'clr-namespace:Microsoft.Intellipad.LanguageServices;assembly=Microsoft.Intellipad.Core'function co......

13 of 4873 | BizUnit Step to Query HAT - I was just refactoring an orchestration today and to help me test it I wanted to query HAT to ensure the orchestration had completed successfully, BizUnit doesn't have a build in step to do this so I created my own which is easy to do thanks to the extensibility of BizUnit. I guess I could probably have used one of the BizUnit database steps and written some fiddly SQL to do this, but a new task would make this fairly reusable. The xml to use my step is below: <TestCase>     <TestSetup> </TestSetup>     <TestExecution>          <TestStep assemblyPath="Acme.BizTalk.Testing.dll" typeName="Acme.BizTalk.Testing.BizUnit.HAT.OrchestrationCompletedQuery......

14 of 4873 | Can Opera Ever Become Popular? - The browser market is stronger than ever. There are no less than five mainstream browsers and dozens of off-shoot projects such as Flock and Maxthon. Web developers have become passionate about their weapon of choice and spend many hours tweaking the software to perfection and evangelising the product to whoever will listen. Opera has been around longer than most. Originally started in 1994, the browser was publicly released in 1996. Version 3 arrived in 1997 and deserved high acclaim for being far more advanced than Internet Explorer and Netscape. Opera has remained at the forefront of innovation. It was certainly one of the earliest browsers to support: a multitude of operating systems, ......

15 of 4873 | DocBook 4.5 Intellisense for Visual Studio - I decided to use DocBook to generate documentation for SalesWeb, but I was finding it difficult to remember which tags I could use. Since DocBook is XML-based, it has a schema that can be plugged into Visual Studio 2005/2008 to enable intellisense. I’ve put together a tiny ZIP file that has everything you need to get started: DocBook 4.5 Intellisense for Visual Studio It contains a VS catalog file and the DocBook 4.5 schemas (which I hope are redistributable… if not, let me know and I’ll remove them). Simply extract the zip file to one of the following directories, depending on your version of Visual Studio: Visual Studio 2005 (8.0) C:\Program Files\Visual Studio 8\Xml\Schemas Visual ......

16 of 4873 | Speaking at KC .Net User Group - I will be speaking about Silverlight and SharePoint at the upcoming KC .Net User Group meeting this Tuesday, March 24th at 6 pm at Centriq (for more information go here: http://www.kcdotnet.com/).  This is pretty much the same talk I have been giving with a little bit at the end talking about some changes in Silverlight 3 addressed (like direct XML Databinding).  I am not going to show any Silverlight 3.0 demos until after my talk on April 18th in St. Louis.  I do not want to break any of my demos right now.  I am taking a few months off from speaking engagements and spending my weekends toying with new technologies, replenishing, and going back home to St. Louis.  If you guys don’t see me ......

17 of 4873 | TryXmlSerialize function - I was using XmlSerialize method from http://serialization.codebetter.com/blogs/brendan.tompkins/archive/2005/03/01/56244.aspxfor a while.Recently I found that sometimes it's safer to use TryXmlSerialize:     /// <summary>     /// Serialize an object into XML     /// </summary>     /// <param name="serializableObject">Object that can be serialized</param>     /// <returns>Serial XML representation</returns>     public static bool TryXmlSerialize(object objectToSerialize, out string strXml)     {         bool bRet=true;         try         {           strXml =XmlSerialize( objectToSerialize);         }         catch (Exception exc)         {......

18 of 4873 | Mix: Mobile Web Sites with ASP.NET MVC and the Mobile Browser Definition File - I gave a talk at Mix 09 today called File | New Company: Creating NerdDinner.com with Microsoft ASP.NET MVC. It was a fun, if challenging talk to do. I did it it with no slides at all. Just me and Visual Studio. It was one of two talks at Mix that had just code. I wonder if it'll catch on? ;) Anyway, it was quite the tightrope walk. I'll post the video here as soon as it's posted on the Mix 09 Sessions Site. UPDATED: Here's the link to the video of my Mix09 talk: Session Video: File | New Company: Creating NerdDinner.com with Microsoft ASP.NET MVC The general structure was to start a File | New Company and build as much of NerdDinner.com as I could in the 75 minutes allott......

19 of 4873 | How RDF Beats Basic XML: Web-Based Data Sharing - The XML format provides the flexibility to describe anything, but it is also prone to errors and miscommunication. Find out how Resource Description Framework (RDF) can be a solution to these limitations....

20 of 4873 | Syndicating and Consuming RSS 1.0 (RDF) Feeds in ASP.NET 3.5 - Websites that produce new content on a regular basis should include a syndication feed, which is a specially formatted XML file that includes a summary of the most recently published items. Virtually all blogs, news sites, and social media sites have a syndication feed, and 4Guys is no exception. The 4GuysFromRolla.com syndication feed contains the most recent articles. Syndication feeds are meant to be consumed by computers. Sites like Technorati parse the syndication feeds from blogs and use that data to determine the topic du jour. Also, syndication feeds are commonly used by websites to display the latest headlines from related sites. For example, an ASP.NET community website c......

21 of 4873 | Microsoft Excel and Twitter via Smart Tags in a VS 2008 Solution - I recent wrote (“Twitter from Excel 2007”) about how Chandoo (Plus JP) caught my attention with their quirky take on updating Twitter from Excel. In there, I said I would lay down an expanded, more useful version. In so doing, I believe I have also provided a raison d’être for the thing in the first place! Here’s the shakedown (keeping in mind that These postings are provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confer no rights.”: I wrote the VS 2008 Add-in for Excel 2007 with a smart tag. The smart tag recognizes phrases or keywords that you have typed into Excel and then, with one click, let’s you post the cell (containing the keyword[s]) or List to Twitter. You can change what/how the sma......

22 of 4873 | Taking XML Validation to the Next Level: Explore CAM's Expressive Power - The generic-sounding Content Assembly Mechanism, or CAM, is an exciting step beyond XML Schema, but it's new and not well documented. This article series represents CAM: The Missing Manual. This last installment is a deep exploration of CAM's ability to express exactly what you need for data-centric documents....

23 of 4873 | Best developer tools - Because of the nature of my work, coaching people on-site and training people in classes, I talk to a lot of developers and managers about the way people work. Unfortunately a lot of companies still don’t unit test their software and don’t setup an automated build. At times that’s specifically what we at Class-A are hired for. But if it’s not, we try to convince our customers that they gain by working with these practices. Most companies want to professionalize and create better (quality) software. But for some reason, this can’t cost them anything. And I’m not talking about development time or learning curve, that’s a different story. I’m talking about the licensing cost of the tools you ......

24 of 4873 | New version of the REST starter kit - Its available now on Codeplex  - I showed off both the client and server pieces of the starter kit at my full-day REST seminar at SDWest this week.   There are some very useful features in the kit like: WebProtocolException and an IErrorHandler implementation that returns correct error codes The HttpClient class and the "Paste as Xml Serializable" feature to help minimize the work necessary when building RESTful clients Those are just two of my favorites but there are a lot more.  I'll be using the HttpClient to help do Conditional GET when I do my Caching in REST talk next Friday at Mix!  If you are going to be in Vegas - some by and say h......

25 of 4873 | Taking XML Validation to the Next Level: XSD Schema vs. CAM - The generic-sounding Content Assembly Mechanism, or CAM, is an exciting step beyond XML Schema, but it's new and not well documented. This is the second in a series of articles representing "CAM: The Missing Manual."...

26 of 4873 | WCF REST Starter Kit Preview 2 is on CodePlex - Go get it here.  This release is significant because they've finally provided a bunch of client-side features through a new generic REST client API called HttpClient.  It makes consuming real-world REST services much easier in .NET.  I've got several screencasts coming shortly. Preview 1 focused on providing server-side features for building RESTful services while Preview 2 is focused on providing equally compelling client-side features.  The following paragraphs outline these differences (from the CodePlex site): WCF REST Starter Kit Preview 1 The first set of features in the starter kit is server-side features for building WCF REST services, which enable or si......

27 of 4873 | Last Call: Selectors Level 3 - 2009-03-10: The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published the Last Call Working Draft of Selectors Level 3. Selectors are patterns that match against elements in a tree, and as such form one of several technologies that can be used to select nodes in an XML document. Selectors have been optimized for use with HTML and XML, and are designed to be usable in performance-critical code. Comments are welcome through 07 April. Learn more about the Style Activity. (Permalink)...

28 of 4873 | Team Build: Part 1 - I’ve had the fortune of being involved in some pretty complex and elegant Team Build configurations.  I’ve started to blog about individual points several times, but ended up figuring that I should instead write a series of posts about common goals and general Team Build approaches.  I can’t take credit for all this content.  Some I’ve developed over time, some I’ve learned from others on the web, and yet other stuff I’ve learned from co-workers.  That said, here we go with Part 1. General Approach Every person has their personal preference, and this is typically taken to the nth degree with programmers.  What follows are my personal preferences.  Yours may vary. First, I like to separat......

29 of 4873 | www.iheartonenote.com - I truly enjoy being enthusiastic about OneNote. I’m not ashamed of my unguarded devotion to this application (share the love via the new site: www.iheartonenote.com). Here at Microsoft, new ideas spring up every day, and those ideas/prototypes/proofs-of-concept fight for attention. They scramble, they hustle, prove their value, and if they are lucky—they survive and make it to big show: They become part of the Microsoft Office brand. OneNote is one such idea, and during the past few years it has radically altered my entire Windows experience. I record, store, share, search, and surf meaningful information in very different ways since I started using this application. I have heard similar ex......

30 of 4873 | Sixeyed.Guidance.CodeGeneration Sample Package - [Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman] The basic Code Generation Guidance Package on CodePlex comes with an additional sample Guidance package. This sample is intended to demonstrate how the functionality of the base package can be customised to create a project-specific Guidance package, where you can easily add tailored code generation recipes to your package. In the basic package are the Wizard steps necessary to configure ad-hoc code generation, but there are also ValueProviders which can read configuration from recipes without requiring the whole user interface. Installation You'll need to modify the hard-coded paths and URIs in the sample package, so it doesn't come w......

31 of 4873 | Hotfix for Visual Studio hang when opening Web project from a remote site - Under certain conditions opening Web projects from remote sites may become very slow. We've seen quite a few 'hang' reports submitted via 'Send Information to Microsoft' feedback (aka Dr. Watson). The reason is that sometimes XML editor (which is used when you edit web.config) may begin walking remote Web site file structure looking for XML schema files. Over a slower link this process may take minutes and IDE will appear unresponsive.   A hotfix is available at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/KB958094   Irinel Crivat Program Manager | Data Programability ...

32 of 4873 | Taking XML Validation to the Next Level: Introducing CAM - The generic-sounding Content Assembly Mechanism, or CAM, is actually an exciting step forward from XML Schema, but it's new, and not well documented. This article series represents CAM: The Missing Manual. ...

33 of 4873 | Twitter from Excel 2007 - I cannot think of any compelling reason for sending a tweet from a form in Excel other than it's kind of cool to know it can be done. Nevertheless, the little add-in for Excel has its charm as an odd little novelty: How to write your own Twitter client in Excel (Userform version is here) You can see my little tweet sent from Excel here: http://twitter.com/johnrdurant I tip my cap to Chandoo (and JP for the form version) on this one. Stay tuned for my addition to the app tomorrow--- I intend to add a little mix of technology in there that will make the application more relevant. Rock Thought of the Day:  The Black Crowes 'Warpaint' LP is fantastic Warpaint Listened to their new CD and......

34 of 4873 | The Twitter Search API made easy with Linq to XML - My pal Lieven and I are preparing some cool demos to show at the Belgian TechDays SharePoint Preconference next week. Our goal is to build up a nice story that shows the various ways how to use SharePoint 2007 in combination with .NET 3.5. For some those demos we're going to make use of one of today's hypes: Twitter! This evening I tried to query Twitter data using Linq and I discovered there are lots of samples available on the net; there's even a complete Linq to Twitter provider on CodePlex. Too bad the Linq to Twitter provider is focused on the tweets for a specific Twitter user and I wanted to make use of Twitter's Search API. It turned out to be very, very easy (thanks to Ro......

35 of 4873 | dom4j: NoClassDefFoundError - I am using dom4j as my xml library in conjunction with my Selenium/Java project. It seemed simple enough, until I got the following stack trace: Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/jaxen/JaxenException I tried a lot of things to resolve this, and finally figured it out: dom4j has a dependency on the jaxen jar. If you grab just the dom4j jar, obviously you don't get that. You have to grab the jaxen jar, put it in your buildpath and have it included before your dom4j jar. A simple thing that took me a little while to figure out. ...

36 of 4873 | XML Security Working Group Releases Eight Working Drafts - 2009-02-26: The XML Security Working Group has published a set of eight Working Drafts. The XML Signature 1.1 and XML Encryption 1.1 First Public Working Drafts make changes to the default sets of cryptographic algorithms in both specifications. XML Security Use Cases and Requirements and XML Signature Transform Simplification: Requirements and Design are documents that we expect to help guide the group's work on a future version of the XML Security specifications that might make more radical changes than the 1.1 series of these specifications. The Working Group would like to receive early feedback on these four drafts....

37 of 4873 | Creating and Consuming Syndication Feeds in ASP.NET 3.5 - Do you run a website that routinely publishes new content? If so, does your site offer a syndication feed? A syndication feed is an XML file that summarizes the most recently published content and is commonly used in blogs, news sites, sports sites, social networking sites, and other content producing websites to provide a machine-readable format of the latest content. For the longest time the .NET Framework did not include built-in support for syndication feeds, meaning that if you needed to generate a syndication feed or parse the syndication feed from another site you either needed to: Write the code yourself, as demonstrated in this article of mine from March 2003: Syndicate Your Web......

38 of 4873 | Serialisation, mixed content and string[] - When you generate a class out of a schema with an element configured to allow mixed content (child attributes and elements as well as text), you should expect the corresponding generated field type to be a string array; So  - if you have a schema that looks like this <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><xs:schema targetNamespace="http://tempuri.org/XMLSchema.xsd" elementFormDefault="qualified"  xmlns="http://tempuri.org/XMLSchema.xsd"  xmlns:mstns="http://tempuri.org/XMLSchema.xsd"xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"><xs:element name="SomeElement"><xs:complexType mixed="true"><xs:sequence><xs:element name="Child1" type="xs:string"/><xs:eleme......

39 of 4873 | Web-scraping using Visual Basic's XML support - We've just had a fascinating article about using VB's XML literals to produce web pages. I've been interested in the other side of the process: using VB's XML support to scrape web-pages for data. Here's the essential bit of code, which looks for something like <div class="content"><h2>Title</h2> <table><tr><td><p>Data1</p></td></tr></table></div>, and extracts the title and the data. Dim fn = Fetch(url) Dim xml = XElement.Load(fn) Dim yui = (From i In xml...<xhtml:div> Where i.GetAttr("class") = "content").FirstOrDefault Dim title = yui.<xhtml:h2>.Value.ToString.Replace(",", " ") Dim data = ......

40 of 4873 | Filters, Libraries And The Web - Daniel Glazman writes, somewhat in passing: We can now apply SVG filters to all content, including HTML 4, in Firefox but I have mixed feelings about the fact you have to know HTML, CSS and SVG to apply such a filter. Seems to me overkill, and too far away from the original spirit of the Web. He didn't enable comments on that post, so I'll reply here: you don't need to know SVG to use filters. You can just paste filter code from a cookbook into an XML file --- or use an XML file from a library --- and refer to that file from your CSS and HTML. This is not only easy and reasonable; SVG filters provide a rich vocabulary of composable operators, so they're much more flexible and powerful than ......

41 of 4873 | PHP 5 + SQL Server 2008 Express - Estou brincando um pouco com o PHP rodando no IIS 7, fazendo tanto acessos ao MySQL como ao SQL Server Express. Então vou aproveitar o gancho e deixar aqui algumas dicas que podem te ajudar a não perder tempo com alguns detalhes de configuração do ambiente. Depois de configurar no IIS um Handler FastCGI para trabalhar com PHP (http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/375/setting-up-fastcgi-for-php/), você deve ter feito o teste básico do <?php phpinfo() ?> e salvo o teste.php. Guarde ele… Feito algumas gracinhas com o PHP, foi hora de acessar o MySQL. Editei o PHP.ini e retirei o comentário da linha “extension=php_mysql.dll” e fui usar a função “mysql_connect”, resultado: “PHP Fatal error: Ca......

42 of 4873 | Powershell and BizTalk testing (Mk 1) - I really like TDD (Test Driven Design) and like to push messages through the system as soon as possible. I have really enjoyed using Powershell to drive the input of XML files into file receive locations. Here are two of the simplest recipes. Repeatedly dropping the same file This will copy a single file one hundred times, each with a different numeric filename (i.e. 1.xml, 2.xml, etc...) for($i = 0; $i -le 100; $ += 1) { Copy-Item .\SampleMsg.xml C:\FileDrop\IN\msg_$i.xml if($i % 10 -eq 0) { $i } } # this is a MS-DOS PAUSE command equivalent Write-Host -NoNewLine "Press any key to continue" $null = $Host.UI.RawUI.ReadKey("NoEcho,IncludeKeyDown") Write-Host " " ......

43 of 4873 | Schematron 2009 released - The latest and greatest release of my (our) open source ISO Schematron validator is out now, available at Schematron.com. Schematron is a validation language for making assertions about the presence or absence of XPath patterns in XML documents; it is the most powerful of any standard schema language for validation. ...

44 of 4873 | Adding and Binding XML in Office Documents - I am frequently asked about how to do some of the basics with XML parts in Office documents. There are excellent blogs and content out there to guide you in working with Office Open XML such as Brian Jones, Doug Mahugh, MSDN, and the Office Open XML SDK. I have also blogged extensively about OOXML and co-authored a major book on XML. But, the need to help more and more people get into the game of XML and Office is ever present. So, here are a couple of routines you'll find useful. The first routine adds two XML parts to a Microsoft Word document. The second removes the first XML part.   Private Sub AddToDataStore()  Dim pCustomPart As CustomXMLPart  Set pCustomPart = ThisDocu......

45 of 4873 | How to Copy a Worksheet within a Workbook - As promised in my previous post about reusable methods for manipulating WordprocessingML, I mentioned I would write a post on how to copy a worksheet within a workbook. Note that this blog post talks about copying a worksheet within the same package. Perhaps sometime in the future I will write a post on how to export/import worksheets across different workbooks. Solution To copy a worksheet within a workbook we need to take the following actions: Open up the Spreadsheet document via the Open XML SDK Access the main workbook part, which will give us access to a bunch of related parts, like the different worksheets Access the worksheet we want to copy Clone the found worksheet p......

46 of 4873 | I'm Speaking at VSLive! San Francisco Next Week! - I'll be speaking in my own home town of San Francisco next week for VSLive! so if you're in the area you should register and come on out! There's an amazing line up of speakers and sessions. Also when you register you get free access to the MSDN Developer Conference on Monday. I'll be showing off some super-cool new Visual Studio 2010 features as well as some tips and tricks of LINQ in Visual Basic 2008 -- including a whole talk devoted to working with LINQ to XML (my personal favorite). VSLive! is a great conference because it really shows you solutions and practical applications you can build today not just tomorrow. And this year you can really get up close and personal with the expert......

47 of 4873 | The Apache XML Project has released Xerces-C++ 3.0.1, an open source schema validating XML parser written in reasonably cross-platform C++. - The Apache XML Project has released Xerces-C++ 3.0.1, an open source schema validating XML parser written in reasonably cross-platform C++. Bug fixes and enhancements include: More......

48 of 4873 | Customizing style sheets for MS Excel - As of version 5.0, Dynamics NAV introduced the option to export forms to MS Office (Word or Excel). Data presented on the form are exported in an xml, formatted using style sheets then sent to Word/Excel/Other programs A Style Sheet tool for Dynamics NAV has later been released to help partners create custom style sheets for export to Word in an easy and user friendly way. A possibillity for extending functionality to export to Excel might be considered for future versions. Meanwhile, customizing style sheets for excel, though requireing basic knowledge in xml and style sheets, can be simplified with some coding handling basic formatting of style sheets. The......

49 of 4873 | D3: Modeling Part 1 – Real-World Relationships - While there are a great many scenarios for “standard” associations in the EF, there are cases where an application requires something a little more sophisticated.  DPMud is no different.  It has two cases. Relationships with Payload A key part of the D3 model is the map which consists of rooms which have a many-many relationship.  Each room can have exits which lead to other rooms.  This would be pretty straightforward except we need to attach properties to the relationship for the name of the exit, whether or not it is locked, etc.  In UML terms this would be called an association class.  Ideally the EF would be able to directly support this kind of relation......

50 of 4873 | Porting WPF Applications to the Microsoft Surface - What do you need to get through the Great Depression 2.0? Why, a giant computing table, of course! Sadly, the Surface SDK isn't available to folks without a real Surface (which, I say, is a bummer) so I can only tell you that developing for it is awesome. Lame, yes, I know. I can't get you the SDK (yet?) or a Surface (I'm broke) but I can tell you what developing for it was like. Of course, if you DO have an extra US$15,000 lying around, why not let your baby sit on it? That's my thinking. BabySmash (Code and DevCenter here) has been on hold over the holidays, although I have a lot of big plans once I get on the other side of the Mix conference. One of the things I talked about at......