XML in the IT World

"I therefore concluded - some weeks ago, before knowing about InfoPath - that corporate IT departments need some way to expose their web services in a manner that makes it easier for power users (and developers) to simply re-use it instead of re-writing it. In current IT culture - and that's sad but true - it's somehow easier for the users to write their own stuff instead. We'd need something as easy as Microsoft Office which one could point at a Schema or a WSDL and which would generate some client side web service interface. " [Ingo Rammer]

Ingo's right! I see this happen on a daily basis. Where I work I see islands of data sitting everywhere. To the point that the CIO made a request, "Our data doesn't need to be on the users' machine". But the problem is we can't develop fast enough. Business changes on a daily basis. Users' needs change on a daily basis. Don is talking about some powerful features in InfoPath. It almost sounds too good to be true but if InfoPath is to XML services what VisualBasic was to desktop development we may have something here. I mean this may be a powerful paradigm shift.

BTW - I remember going in to a client's office a few months back to do some database consulting. He showed me a solution he built in Excel. It was basically a 50+ table system with each table stored in a different Excel file using macros to join data together. Plus to get data into a pseudo-cube there was another 50+ Excel files with a lines of macros aggregating the data. Just imagine seeing this on your first day of consulting... =)

Food Unwrapped

I just found out that the Almond plant that I work at will be on the FoodTV show "Unwrapped". It's scheduled to air Monday, 03/10 9:00 PM ET.

XML-RPC Spell Checker

"I was able to whip this up in VS.NET using XML-RPC.NET in short order, it really needs a spell checker widget though (hey, MSFT wake up!, there's a spell checker API bundled in OSX)" [Simon Fell]

Have you checked this out: http://www.stuffeddog.com/speller/doc/rpc.html
It's a spell checker with an XML-RPC front end.

Reflection and HREF EXE's

I have a project that's built with multiple EXE's which are deployed from a web server (http://servername/myapp.exe). I needed to create an instance of a winform in one EXE from another EXE. I fiddled with some code and came up with this:


private void showContact(int contactId)
{
  Assembly asm = Assembly.LoadFrom( getServerName() +
    "/ContactEdit/ContactEdit.exe" );
  object o = asm.CreateInstance( "ContactEdit.ContactClient" );

  MethodInfo method = o.GetType().GetMethod( "LoadContact" );
  method.Invoke(o, new Object[] { contactId } );
  ((Form)o).Show();
}


I was happy to see that I can remotely load an EXE type assembly.

What was that?...did somebody say IDispatch?...oh...you said "I love that"...cool

(insert blank face emoticon here)

Asyn DNS resolving

"As it can be seen from the Rotor sources, the class responsible for DNS resolutions is called ServicePoint, and the query is done in its method called GetNextIPAddressInfo(). And while it is simple to do DNS queries asynchronously (Dns.BeginResolve() is readily available), it is not so easy to pass the DNS information to HttpWebRequest. So far, I have thought of only one solution not resorting to manual threading: I can parse the request URLs and replace the host name with a dotted-decimal IP address after the DNS resolution is complete (for example, a request to "home.yole.ru/weblog/index.xml" would be rewritten as "80.70.224.68/weblog/index.xml")." [yole's devblog]

I would advise against this. There may be websites setup as a virtual site on the same IP. To distinguish between sites IIS looks at the host name. If the request comes through with an IP it would get directed to the wrong site.

NAnt supporting multiple frameworks

"I just checked in support for using multiple frameworks from NAnt. You
can now use multiple frameworks in the same build file and NAnt will run
the tools from the appropriate directories. It doesn't support resolving
assembly references yet so I guess for compact framework you'll still
need to specify full paths for references. - Ian MacLean" [nant-dev]

This is good news. I'm just starting to build a set of cfNET apps and was planning on using NAnt to automate the build process. BTW - Anybody else using cfNET?

Impressive ASP.NET control

I was so blown away when I first saw how dramatic the change was from ASP to ASP.NET. I saw a lot of potential in the web control component area.

Today I'm testing out a combo box control that is pretty slick: dbCombo. It's a database driven combo box containing a set of much needed features. For example, it has the auto-fill feature. Start typing and the first item closest to the prefix is selected. Another neat feature is that it only downloads a necessary portion of the list. So if you have a combo list that's 1M lines it only starts with the first 10. Then as you start typing it drills down narrowing the scope. Pretty slick if you ask me.

Happy Bipolar day!!

Happy Bipolar day!!

03-03-03