Morning Compilation by Hal Hayes

Getting the DLLs out of the GAC

hal.hayes@acritech.com (Hal Hayes) — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 15:25:15 GMT

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.

This weblog is sponsored by ACRITECH Corporation.

CodeCamp SOUTH (Woodbridge, Va)

hal.hayes@acritech.com (Hal Hayes) — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 16:47:14 GMT

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!

This weblog is sponsored by ACRITECH Corporation.

Interested in learning how to write DotNetNuke modules? Come to C-Dug

hal.hayes@acritech.com (Hal Hayes) — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 01:26:18 GMT

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.

This weblog is sponsored by ACRITECH Corporation.

Should .Net Framework support XQuery?

hal.hayes@acritech.com (Hal Hayes) — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 23:07:35 GMT

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.

This weblog is sponsored by ACRITECH Corporation.

Excellent Presentation by Paul Vick, Microsoft VB Language Architect

hal.hayes@acritech.com (Hal Hayes) — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 20:34:18 GMT

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.

This weblog is sponsored by ACRITECH Corporation.

Jasper Johansson is coming to CAPAREA!

hal.hayes@acritech.com (Hal Hayes) — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 12:43:59 GMT

Circle your calendars for Tuesday, December 13th for a premier presentation at the Capital Area .NET User Group!! CAPAREA meets in Tysons Corner (directions).

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!

This weblog is sponsored by ACRITECH Corporation.

Creating an XQuery application in .NET using Altova’s XML Engine

hal.hayes@acritech.com (Hal Hayes) — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 19:47:35 GMT

Altova is providing its AltovaXML^TM engine as a free download (and it is royalty-free). You download the engine and learn more about it here. I will discuss using this engine with .NET to process XQuery statements.

AltovaXML^TM is an XML standards processor (see the World Wide Web Consortium at www.w3c.org for more) that includes engines that drive Altova’s products, like their XMLSpy^TM product. XMLSpy is the industry standard for working with XML. While the price of the product has grown with each new release, so has the capability of the product and the feature set is quite rich.

That having been said, the documentation is somewhat sparse. However, yours truly has spent a little time with this free product in an attempt to make use of the XQuery portion of the processor. With a little bit of trial-and-error, you can develop a very nice XQuery processor application with Visual Studio .NET. This example uses .NET Framework 1.1, but I recently demonstrated a version of this same application that runs quite well with Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 (.NET Framework 2.0).

The AltovaXML engine comes with interfaces for COM, Java, and .NET. Adding the engine to your project via the “References” is described quite well in the help files that come with the engine, so they will not be discussed here.

Here is the object browser view of the XQuery class. Note that there are a handful of methods for declaring input, ouptut, and error attributes.

In the code line below, note that an AltovaXMLLib Application is instantiated. From this object we will reference and begin to work with the XQuery engine.

[Note: For some reason some of the XQuery calls that involve references to an external XML file do not work if you use the AltovaXMLLib.Application.XQuery object directly. Creating an XQuery variable and setting it to the AltovaXMLLib.Application.XQuery works as expected.]

In the first few lines, we declare if there is an external source for the XML input file by providing the URL to the file. This can be either a local file path or a URL to an external XML document (like an RSS feed).

Note that the code specifies receiving the XQuery text from a textbox control on the user interface. It is also possible to receive the XQuery from an external file.

The output result is specified as either XML or Text depending upon our choice.

Here is the program running with a resultant output.

In the VS2005 version that I demonstrated at the CAPAREA user group presentation, I added an additional form that contained a web-browser control for displaying XML data.

When you run the application, you get this command window that pops up that contains a reference to Altova’s copyright. As long as you continue to use the same AltovaXMLLib Application object, you will only have one of these windows open. So, in other words, everytime you instantiate an AltovaXMLLib Application object, you get this command window that pops up.

Running XQuery Statements

Setting the input file to an RSS feed, you can generate some results that demonstrate the power of XQuery over XML data. I used the Microsoft MSDN feed for my input file (http://msdn.microsoft.com/rss.xml). Note that this feed formats the data using XSL when you open it in your browser - to see the raw feed select Source under the View menu in IE.

Use this XQuery statement to return the entire XML tree from the document root:

for $rss in /rss

return $rss

Notice “/rss” is an XPath statement to the document element in an RSS feed. This is assigned to the “$rss” variable, which is returned as output.

Use this XQuery statement to return a text output containing just the titles of all the RSS items:

for $rss in //item

let $carriageReturn := "
"

return

concat($rss/title, $carriageReturn )

In this statement, we assign the line-feed/carriage return ASCII values ("
" ) to the variable $carriageReturn. This is concatenated onto each title string that is returned.

Use this XQuery statement to return a text output containing title and date for each item in the RSS feed:

for $rss in //item

let $carriageReturn := "
"

let $div := "//"

return

concat($rss/title,

concat($div,

concat($rss/pubDate, $carriageReturn)

)

Notice the nested concatenation and multiple let assignments.

The resulting output looks like this:

A New Alliance —Palm and Windows Mobile 5.0!//Sat, 01 Oct 2005 00:08:04 GMT

Persisting Ink on the Web//Fri, 30 Sep 2005 22:51:34 GMT

In conclusion, the Altova XML engine is a very good starting point for developers that want to try their hand at XQuery, and the engine can be integrated directly into your .NET applications.

This weblog is sponsored by ACRITECH Corporation.

Microsoft experts working on standards committees. I think it's a good thing!

hal.hayes@acritech.com (Hal Hayes) — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 13:15:57 GMT

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.

This weblog is sponsored by ACRITECH Corporation.

Interesting suggestion made by Rocky Lhotka at PDC Pre-conference

hal.hayes@acritech.com (Hal Hayes) — Sun, 11 Sep 2005 22:03:48 GMT

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.

This weblog is sponsored by ACRITECH Corporation.

Building Custom Windows Forms Controls in VS 2005

hal.hayes@acritech.com (Hal Hayes) — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 18:14:11 GMT

Clyde Barretto, TMA Resources, presented at CAPAREA on Tuesday, August 23, 2005, on Building Custom Windows Forms Controls.

Very cool. His presentation not only went into the "how" but also the why of building customer form controls. I will paraphrase his concept..."A custom control can encapsulate presentation logic for a particular use-case that can be used on multiple forms. The advantage to doing this is that should the presentation logic/interface need to change, you can change it in one place and have the changes ripple through out the forms on which the user control is placed."

This weblog is sponsored by ACRITECH Corporation.

Altova announces free XML engine available for download

hal.hayes@acritech.com (Hal Hayes) — Thu, 11 Aug 2005 14:48:31 GMT

Altova, makers of the wonderful XMLSpy tool, looks to be giving the XML component world a run. They have announced the release of an XML component, called AltovaXML, that includes an XQuery engine. And, yes, it comes with bot COM and .NET interfaces.

You can get it here.

Ed Tittel has an excellent article on the software release on SearchWebservices.Com. You can read it here.

This weblog is sponsored by ACRITECH Corporation.

Tim Huckaby on Smart Clients

hal.hayes@acritech.com (Hal Hayes) — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 02:09:11 GMT

Tim Huckaby gave a great presentation on Tuesday, 28 June, at CAPAREA.NET on Smart Clients.

I thought the highlight was an application that presented traffic conditions and actual traffic video in a smart device, like a PDA or smart phone. While even the best of information would be inconsequential in the overloaded traffic in the DC metro area, it was nonetheless impressive!

Tim touched on many of the features of the Whidbey release (.NET Framework 2.0) that will really be a pleasant surprise for developers building WinForm-based applications. Tim expressed a strong preference for WinForm (vice Web/browser-based) applications, where users can take advantage of rich-client interfaces.

This weblog is sponsored by ACRITECH Corporation.

More on the XQuery in .NET 2.0 controversy

hal.hayes@acritech.com (Hal Hayes) — Thu, 26 May 2005 14:37:37 GMT

Interesting article in the XML Journal about XQuery.

Can XQuery Be Saved on the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0?

Here's a quote from the article, "the community of XQuery developers, led by Stylus Studio, is now launching a campaign to make XQuery a priority for Microsoft ...".

The article states that XQuery probably won't make it into the .NET Framework until around 2009.

This weblog is sponsored by ACRITECH Corporation.

XQuery in .NET Framework...revisited

hal.hayes@acritech.com (Hal Hayes) — Mon, 23 May 2005 05:49:31 GMT

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.

This weblog is sponsored by ACRITECH Corporation.