Wandering in the land of .NET
Useful snippets of information that don't fit into any other category.
Well, Owen has been bugging me to blog... so just to keep him quiet, here's something random...
If you want to hook up on the XBox 360 then here's my Gamercard!
Ever wanted to quickly and easily try out different XPath expressions on your documents?
Just click this link!
A couple of blog entries that I wanted to highlight, but I've been a bit late blogging on (blame short-sharp-"just do this project before Christmas would you?" type work). First, I'm sure you've all seen it by now, but Scott Colestock is continuing his barnstorming work on BizTalk deployment with NAnt. Check it out. BAT files are so 1980's ;-) If you're not doing something similar in your deployments (either through your own work, or using Scott's) then you are really missing a trick. Also, a big ......
Note: The GeeksWithBlogs editor seems to keep really messing with the formatting / XML of this post. If you spot any errors, please hit the Contact Me link above and I'll try to wrestle it into submission again :-) This entry may be useful to people confused by BizTalk's inclination to "ns0" at the drop of a hat :-) Someone asked me today why their XML document wasn't validating. They thought that it was because the schema was expecting messages with a default namespace of "uri:my-namespace" but ......
Sorry it's been quiet recently, but I've been travelling a fair bit, working on customer sites, and wading in to some good old BizTalk 2002 stuff. I'm also 3 weeks away from delivering my M.Sc. Thesis that I've been working on part time since January with The Open University, so my spare time is being sucked into that. Also the really cool side projects I've been doing with BTS2004 I can't really blog about at the moment :-( Look soon for a little update to Scott Colestock's NAnt script (anybody ......
Just a quickie that might save you a lot of pain if you are working with schemas and files in UTF8, or that started in UTF8 but you've subsequently changed to unicode... If you are getting lots of complaints about the encoding changing when you check in, or finding your files suddenly having Foo at the end of each line, make sure Sourcesafe has your files checked in as Binary rather than Text files. To do this, open up the SourceSafe client, right click the newly added schema, and make sure Sourcesafe ......
If you are consuming a remote web service from BizTalk (or ASP.NET) and you are behind a proxy server, you may receive an exception when BizTalk tries to call that web service: System.Net.WebException - The underlying connection was closed: Unable to connect to the remote server at System.Net.HttpWebRequest.C... at System.Net.HttpWebRequest.E... asyncResult) at System.Net.HttpWebRequest.G... at System.Web.Services.Protoco... ......
Today I spent some time experimenting with the xsi:type to allow subclassing in my XML Schemas, as described in "W3C XML Schema Design Patterns: Dealing With Change" by Dare Obasanjo. Many of the xsi:type examples on the web give the xsi namespace declaration as xmlns:xsi=http://www.w3c.or... .NET users look out! If you use this declaration in your XML instance document then it won't validate in VS.NET... you must reference w3.org, not w3c.org. The correct declaration for the ......
The ASP.NET Enterprise Manager is a pretty funky web-based, Open Source version of Enterprise Manager. Think of it as a very good cover version of the original ;-) Two immediate benefits are obvious: MSDE users have a proper management tool at last No need to install SQL tools locally or use a Remote Desktop Connection just to administrate SQL Server There's still a reasonable TO-DO list for the tool, but it's pretty usable as-is ......
This probably belongs in the "really, really obvious" category - but since it is also really really useful, I'll blog it :-) Installing BizTalk 2004 isn't just a "Double click setup.exe" job, so it's nice to create a Virtual Machine containing your one-stop dev environment, containing SQL, VS.NET, BTS, NUnit, and so on. It's also nice to be able to connect up to network resources such as Sourcesafe, the Internet, and so on. Now, networks don't like multiple machines with the same name, so if two ......
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