January 28, 2004

MVP list updated

MVP list was updated this night to reflect recent awards. Now it's 13 XML MVPs. It's nice to see the number (IMHO rough analogue of importance and appreciation within MSFT and the community) is growing. Meanwhile I've started to enjoy MVP benefits :) I didn't explored all yet, being lost ...

January 27, 2004

msdn.microsoft.com/data

MSDN starts new Data Access & Storage Developer Center, msdn.microsoft.com/data, "the home for developer information on Microsoft data technologies from MSDN" (via Chris Sells). Great, worth to subscribe. List of related bloggers (indispensable attribute of any portal nowadays) - http://msdn.microsoft.com/data/community/blogs. Stars like Dino Esposito, Mike Gunderloy, Andrew Conrad, Michael Rys ...

January 26, 2004

On including external text into Word 2003 document

Looks like everyone but I knows it. I stumbled at Mike Gunderloy's "Working with Microsoft Office 2003 Documents and Web Services" article at OfficeZealot.com illustrating how to use INCLUDETEXT field in Word 2003. Very nice feature! Here is how it looks like for XML nerd, newbie in Word. INCLUDETEXT field ...

January 25, 2004

Reading Feb 2004 MSDN Mag

Well, it's Sunday. Calm and peace around newsgroups, forums and blogs. But in Israel it's workday, really. And I like it btw. RSS waves brought me today really enjoyable reading - MSDN Mag February 2004 issue. Nice. Here are couple of cynical comments though: "Console Appplications in .NET" by Michael ...

January 22, 2004

Aaron Skonnard is blogging

Breaking news: Aaron Skonnard is blogging! (Via Carnage4Life). A must feed for every XML geek. ...

January 20, 2004

Becoming MVP

Well, another wave of MVP awards spreads these days. Now I got it too. In XML area of course. Thanks to all who supported me. Thanks to MVPs who nominated me. I see two more XMLers - DonXML and Daniel Cazzulino have been awarded too. Congrats, guys! Update: another XmlInsider ...

Another reason to visit amazon

Mike Gunderloy: Coder to Developer - One of the books that is almost done, though you'll have to wait a few months to get a copy. Amazon: Coder to Developer: Tools and Strategies for Delivering Your Software by Mike Gunderloy, Sybex (Publisher) Book Description Are you ready to take the ...

January 19, 2004

"XML in Office 2003" book published

Priscilla Walmsley, author of great "Definitive XML Schema" announced a new book, now about XML in Office 2003: I'm pleased to announce the release of XML in Office 2003: Information Sharing with Desktop XML, a book that I co-authored with Charles Goldfarb. It can be found on Amazon at: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/013142193X/priscillawalm-20 ...

January 18, 2004

The Name Of The Beast

Somehow many believe it's impossible to get OuterXml/InnerXml out of XPathNavigator, but in fact it's merely one-screen-of-code class. And by the way, in System.Xml v2 XPathDocument2 class does have such properties already. So I've written a small class, which exposes this omitted functionality. It's lightweight wrapper around XPathNavigator, which adds ...

January 16, 2004

Fighting spam comments. MovableType 2.661 released

MovableType version 2.661 has been released. The release aimed completely to fix spam comments problem. New anti-spam weapon includes: We've included a throttling measure so that comments from the same IP address can only be posted every N seconds, where N is configurable (documentation on the setting that controls N ...

January 15, 2004

How to kill DOM

In the beginning Microsoft created the Microsoft.XMLDOM, known today as Msxml2.DOMDocument. And people like(d) it much. Then .NET happened and people were given XmlReader, XmlWriter, XmlDocument, XPathDocument, XPathNavigator and XmlDataDocument. Surprisingly most of us stuck to XmlDocument for no-matter-which scenario. Now we've been notified the Gods decided to kill XmlDocument ...

January 14, 2004

On chewing chewed gum once again

Mark Pilgrim started a new wave of permathreding by "There are no exceptions to Postel's Law" rant arguing even malformed RSS feeds should be accepted. I'm strongly on opposite side. Accepting malformed XML - what a heresy! My understanding of Postel's Law a bit differs. "Liberal" in "be liberal in ...

January 11, 2004

Don Box on WordML and XHTML+CSS

Don Box talks about his weekend hobby - getting XHTML+CSS from WordML. Using XSLT of course. And it works - Don bloggs in Word, publishing in XHTML. Resulting HTML is not optimal yet (see page source), but perfectly proves the concept. Well, as per Don WordML and XHTML are twins ...

SgmlReader gets updated

Chris Lovett has released SgmlReader version 1.2. It's mostly bug fixes release. Via Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life SgmlReader is an XmlReader, which is able to parse SGML documents (e.g. HTML). ...

January 7, 2004

Generating WordprocessingML using XSLT: Lists

I'm writing this entry to illustrate basics of generating lists in WordprocessingML documents using XSLT. Also I want to test how my office-related rants are syndicated by the wonderful OfficeZealot.com site. [Prerequisites: Make sure you've read what "Overview of WordprocessingML" says about lists]. Basically a list in WordprocessingML consists of ...

January 6, 2004

Happy 2004 under spam attack

Happy New Year to everybody my dear readers! Now back to mundane things. Yesterday for the first time my blog has been seriously attacked by evil comment spammer. Last months I got used to receive 6-7 spam/troll comments a week and remove them out weekly, but this guy(application?) has sent ...