I need to have access to the Microsoft Office Interop files which are typically installed in the GAC. You cannot just reach in and copy these out like normal files, but look down at Matthew Cosier's entry on this site for a workable solution.

SharePoint Tip: Where to find the SharePoint Assemblies for development

Thanks to Kim at JHHC for suggesting that it could be done fairly easily. As ususal, she was right.

Working with Microsoft MVP, Jeff Schoolcraft, we have organized a wonderful developer learning event on Saturday, March 29th at Strayer University in Woodbridge, Va.

CodeCamp SOUTH

Speakers include:

• Brian Noyes, Microsoft MVP
• Jonathan Cogley, Microsoft MVP
• Sahil Malik, Microsoft MVP
• Frank LaVigne, Microsoft MVP
• Antonio Chagoury, DotNetNuke Team Lead

and many more.

Topics to be covered include a host of new technologies along with some introductory courses. Here is a sample (you can see the rest at the NovaCodeCamp site).

• Visual Studio 2008
• SQL Server 2008
• SharePoint 2007
• DotNetNuke Module Development
• Office 2007 Development
• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Development
• Ajax
• Silverlight

For you developers, this is a golden opportunity to see presentations that would typically be presented at high priced conferences like Microsoft TechEd and VSLive. And it is FREE. However, registration is limited to the first 100 that sing up - so make your reservation today!

Who: Capital DotNetNuke User Group

When: Thursday, June 21st

Where: AT&T Building, 1900 Gallows Road, Vienna VA 22182

ACRITECH is sponsoring the meeting on Thursday. Come out, eat pizza, and learn how to develop add-ins for the best open-source content management system on the Internet.

XQuery has now reached standardization by the W3C. The XML Team at Microsoft is now asking for input on whether there should be a standalone XQuery implementation in the .Net Framework in their blog entitled Standalone XQuery Implementation in .NET?.

My posted response is below:

I, also, would like to see an XQuery implementation within the .Net Framework.

If available, I would be more inclinded to use XQuery over XSLT, particularly in a more dynamic setting to extract data, and then to shape the output before consuming within an application.

While the XQuery implementation in SQL Server 2005 is excellent, it is still only a subset of the standard, for example, the ability to query against multiple documents. And, I would prefer to see the implementation as native to the .Net Framework, rather than as a commercial add-on.

The differences between what could be and what is available now are two fold. First, the current implementation resides on server-side, within the SQL Server itself. A .Net Framework (System.XML.XQuery) implementation would allow the developer to choose where the query would be executed. Additionally, you would be able to query across multiple documents, which you cannot do in the SQL Server 2005 version.

I have found the XQuery syntax to be easier to craft to extract XML content and shape the output than using XSLT. I think there is a strong incentive to have the XQuery implementation because it can provide some features that may either be missing or are easier to use than SQL Server XQuery, LINQ or XSLT.

I vote "Yes" to XQuery in the .Net Framework.

CAPAREA was visited by none other than Mr. VB, himself, Paul Vick. He is the Microsoft VB language architect on Tuesday, September 26th.

Paul's topic was "Visual Basic 9.0: Language Integrated Query (LINQ), XML integration and beyond...". Paul is also author of The Visual Basic .NET Programming Language.

The speaker was a huge draw for our group. We had over 65 people in attendance last night.   

Kudos to Scott Lock, CAPAREA President, for getting Jasper Johansson, Microsoft Security Expert, as a presenter on December 13th.

The presentation that he will give is still being discussed, but needless to say, his "How To Get Your Network Hacked in 10 Easy Steps" and other presentations were SRO (standing room only) at recent Microsoft TechEd conferences. Not only are his topics critically important to IT developers and administrators, but he is one of the best presenters I have seen (and I have seen a few).

See you there!

OK, this is my own personal opinion, but I think it is in Microsoft's best interest to have people on standards committees and working groups, like the World Wide Web (W3C).

I imagine that it might be uncomfortable for Microsoft and its managers to have staff that both pursue work on Microsoft projects and also work on standards committes. Not only is there the issue of dividing time with your valuable resources (i.e. your employee), but also there may be times when the standards work against Microsoft.

However, that being said, as a programmer and developer, I am more apt to embrace technologies that work with open standards - not necessarily open source - then those that don't. Politically, it is a good move for Microsoft - I think it helps with acceptance of the product and tools. And, on a personal level, I hold in high esteem those folks that are working hard to come up with the standards so that systems can be built that are flexible, consistent, and can communicate. I imagine that it is not easy to work in such a compromising environment, but i am confident that the results will yield better tools for us developers.

Like it or not, it is the developers, and others down at the code or hardware level, who will always be the evangelists for technologies. I've rarely ever met a manager that was. If Microsoft relies on managers to be its guide, then it will lose its passion and the passion of its developer community, and become just another company. But "playing nice" in a cooperative manner with standards groups is one way to keep that passion alive...and I applaud Microsoft for its involvement and hope they continue to do so.

I am attending the .NET Framework 2.0 - The Smart Client Perspective. Great stuff. This one is being presented by Rocky Lhotka and Billy Hollis. I highly recommend checking out any presentation these two guys do -- they have some great material and they are very good speakers. Anyway...

Rocky was discussing architectures, basically where the business and data objects on what tiers (client, back end server, etc.) and what type of applications those create (browser based, rich client, etc.), and he expressed an idea on something I and many others have obviously have thought about... Building a presentation tier/client that accepts both data and metadata.

The purpose of the metadata is to provide information to the UI so that controls...probably smart controls...can populate themselves and handle validation --- without having to know anything about the business rules. So, the client has no business object at all, it communicates (perhaps remotely) with the business layer.

The smart controls would get data to help populate things like combo box items, and just enough validation logic to assist the user in entering valid data and prohibiting invalid information. This system would allow the UI to "reconfigure itself" within bounds to adapt to a slightly different domain (different user roles, different but similar data sets).

We developed something similar to this for a VB6 application that used a custom web-services layer for communication. We not only handled the validation issue, but we also handled event operations. An example was the population of a tree control from the data, purely handled by the UI, but we had metadata that determined not only what events were available, but also what operations were available on a per-element basis. The UI interpreted the operation information by turning on or off menu items, or revealing or hiding controls - like buttons.

While this scheme could handle a host of validation issues, there were some business cases that could only be resolved by comparisons against various tables within the datastore. Therefore, when an input operation was made to the business layer, we had a return call that told the client whether the operation had succeeded, and if not, why it did not. Also, calls made via these operations might inform the UI to "refresh" its overall data-representation (repopulate the tree control, for instance) since the data may have changed. This refresh reference could apply to a single entity type or for the entire tree.

Rocky hinted that Billy Hollis was going to talk about an implementation of such a system that he had done.

Interesting article in the XML Journal about XQuery.

For those interested in why XQuery is not in .NET Framework 2.0, Arpan Desai's blog has a short summation here. Also, one of the outstanding issues is that XQuery will not reach Recommendation status by W3C until sometime next year while Framework 2.0 is set to be released this year.

Not that I know, but I would venture to guess that we will see XQuery in the .NET Framework with an updated version (2.1?) which will probably be available around 2007.