Contents tagged with XML
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Announcing the NJ SQL Server User Group
It has been a long time coming, but NJ will finally see the return of a SQL Server User Group. I’ve been trying to get this group going for about a year now, and the biggest hang-ups has been trying to get a location, and finding volunteers to help run the group. Well, we solved both issues with the help of the great folks at SetFocus (who run the Northern NJ .Net User Group N3UG). My wife, Melissa (aka SQL Diva), is going to run the user group, and SetFocus will let us hold the meetings in their facility in Parsippany, NJ (which is very close to where I live, and makes it possible for Melissa to run the group). The meeting will be held the 3rd Tues. of the month (a week after the .Net User Group), and will start on Jan. 17th. Informal networking begins at 6PM and the presentation starts at 6:30 (until about 8PM).
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XML Tools I’d Like To See Built For Visual Studio.Net
While at this year’s XMLDevCon I came up with 2 VS.Net add-ins that I’d wanted to write and release as open source for .Net. I was withholding the ideas figuring that I would find time to write them, but it has been a couple months and I haven’t even begun work on them. So, I’ll publish them here, and hopefully someone else will help take up the gauntlet.
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Do We Love XSLT Because It Is Difficult To Learn?
M. David (on his XSLTBlog) asks why some of us are drawn to XSLT and has a great quote (well sort of quote) from Tim Bray from a late night drinking session at XMLDevCon:
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Not the Way to Introduce XmlTextReader
Thom Robbins is a great guy, but unfortunately for him he has bumped into one of my major pet peeves, Viral Coding Examples with his Introducing the XmlTextReader post. It really isn’t his fault, since the code he uses is very similar to the code example in the XmlTextReader.Read() documentation, and I complained about that code to the System.Xml team at the MVP Summit. I did promise to write something up on it, and Thom’s post finally got me to do it (it has been months since I promised to write this up).
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Viral Coding Examples in Presentations
Joe Fawcett (fellow XML MVP) came across a great example (from the Microsoft.Public.Xml newsgroup) of one of my biggest pet peeves, “We (the community) are doing a very poor job teaching the average developer how to use XML properly in .Net”.
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NJ Dev Dinner 9/14/2004 – Special Edition
Right after the N3UG meeting (with Dave Douglass’ presentation on Generics), we will have a special edition of the NJ Dev Dinner. What’s the occasion? Microsoft Developer Evangelist Kirk Allen Evans is coming up from Atlanta, GA, and will be in the area. After the meeting we will move on over to Chevy’s for some fun, food, and drink.
The preceding blog entry has been syndicated from the DonXML Demsak’s All Things Techie Blog. Please post all comments on the original post.
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A Suggestion for the Microsoft Careers Site
I was on the Microsoft Technical Recruiting Chat last night (I’m not really looking, just snooping around), when I remembered a comment made by either Zoë or Gretchen (I can’t remember who, or even find it) about making sure that your resume looked good in plain text when submitting it via their site. They don’t take resumes in Word format (or even HTML), and you can either paste vanilla text into a free form input box, or use the resume builder. They mentioned that as an applicant, you should make sure the plain text version of your resume is easy to read, and not just a Word doc saved as text (which would be very hard on the eyes). At the time I read that, I thought it was a good tidbit, so I filed it away for future reference. During the chat something clicked, and I remembered that Microsoft had released an Office Solution Accelerator for Recruiting, which includes a nice resume builder section. The resume builder includes an InfoPath Resume Form (which uses the HR-XML schema for resumes), and a complementing resume submittal web service. Shouldn’t Microsoft recruiting IT department do a little dogfooding, and be using this? It is definitely better than submitting a text version of a resume, and trying to shred the document. Plus, since it is an XML document, they could easily apply an XSL (either XSLT to WordML or XSL-FO to PDF) and transform the resume into an easy to read format for the recruiters. I know that everyone does not have InfoPath (but it is an excellent tool), so they would have to create an alternate means to creating an XML version of the resume (can we say open source project?), and still maintain the good old text box input method for the less technical folks applying to Microsoft. It sounds to me like there would be a decent return on investment for this type of thing, with Microsoft hiring some 7000 people this year.
The preceding blog entry has been syndicated from the DonXML Demsak’s All Things Techie Blog. Please post all comments on the original post.
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DataMapper Performance Statistics On VS2005 Beta 1 and SQL Server 2005 Beta2
I took the code from my previous DataMapper examples, which was written for .Net 1.1 and SQL2K, and ported it to VS2005 Beta 1 with SQL Server 2K5. I did not have to change one line of code in either the sprocs or in the 1.1 C# code (great going VS & SQL team). Since my example code also used the DAAB 3.1, I decided to port that too, with no issues. Since I was going to be testing the beta versions running in VPC, I new that I would not be able to compare my original stats to the new stats. But since what I’m really after was performance differences versus a baseline of the DataReader, and comparing those numbers, running on a host OS versus a VPC OS should not be a factor (as long as the OS is the same, which it was, Windows XP).
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Revisiting XML DevCon 2003 – The Videos
It is hard to believe, but it has been just over one year since XML DevCon 2003. Because most of the subject mater was pretty ahead of its time for the common enterprise developer, I’m sure most of the people that read this blog either didn’t watch the videos on MSDN TV, or only understood a limited amount of the content. Now with another years worth of experience under your belt, you should take the time to watch them again. I’ve found lots of little tid bits that I missed the last time.
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Performance Statistics of Various Implementations of the Data Mapper Pattern
What started off as a quick how-to example of rehydrating business objects from data access layers (in reply to this Jay Kimble post) morph’d into a whole lot more (thanks to Scott Hansleman’s DataSet post, and my thoughts on the topic). The idea was pretty simple. I wanted to see how long it took to rehydrate a multi-dimension object graph from data retrieved from a database using the most common methods in .Net. Going into this project, I had some preconceived notions on what the results would be, but I was very surprised at the results.