Paul's development blog

I just started using Windows Live Writer to update my blogs*. I'm thoroughly impressed with what I see, both from the practical sense and just how much cool seems to surround this thing.

1) My Apartment Building, Washington, DC

Software+Services is Microsoft's answer to the debate about where the future of computing is going in the near future. My take on what this means is a badass WinForms interface with a sexy back-end built around some Web 2.0-ish stuff. That's the technical explanation.

Live Writer epitomizes all of this. It's a lightweight, feature- and graphics-rich editing environment, and it's very closely integrated with a bunch of "Web 2.0" sites, including a pile of blog packages and social media sites.

There are some neat plug-ins "out of the box", including one that took me exactly 12 seconds to show you an image of my apartment building (see image 1).

Plus, there seems to be an active plug-in community developing things to better pretty up source code, integrate with Flickr, Facebook and other sites. Some of em are crap, but the architecture seems like it must be easy enough to be accessible. One cool one is the Amazon Book Lookup plugin (see example below)

Some of the interface features I'm falling in love with include the ability to match the style to the blog's style (so I can switch between the three blogs and see how it'll look in each one), and the ability to pull up old posts from the "Open" menu.

Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto by Anneli Rufus Read more about this book...

* My blogs:

• My GeeksWithBlogs Blog
• My MSDN Blog
• My Personal Blog

In order to implement server-side XSD validation against an InfoPath form submission, I had to pull the XSD from the InfoPath document archive (XSN file) and use that to update an embedded resource in a SharePoint solution project (including automated checkout/checkin in TFS). I was able to do it using a batch file.

Pretty specialized need, but maybe somebody could make use of it someday ;).

@echo off

rem ***********************************************************
rem This batch file is used to extract the XSD files from each of the InfoPath forms, and copy them into the source tree
rem Download and install the Microsoft CAB SDK from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310618 to c:\cabsdk
rem ***********************************************************

rem IMPORTANT: Set these values to your system. Do not include trailing slashes, and include values in quotes if necessary

set CABSDK_PATH=c:\cabsdk\bin
set ROOT=C:\projects\projectname
set TFS_USERNAME="domain\user.name"
set TFS_PASSWORD=password

rem These should be relatively fixed
set FORMS_ROOT=%ROOT%\Project.Namespace\12\TEMPLATE\Layouts\infopathForms
set XSD_ROOT=%ROOT%\Project.Namespace\12\Resources
set TF_PATH=C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE

echo.
echo ********* InfoPath Form 1 *********
echo.
set FORM_PATH=%FORMS_ROOT%\Form 1\Form1.xsn
set XSD_PATH=%XSD_ROOT%\Form1.xsd
set RETURN=FINISH
goto UPDATE_SCHEMA

:FINISH
goto FINISH_BATCH

:UPDATE_SCHEMA
echo Checking file out...
"%TF_PATH%\tf.exe" edit "%XSD_PATH%" /login:%TFS_USERNAME%,%TFS_PASSWORD% /noprompt >/nil

echo Extracting file...
del myschema.xsd
"%CABSDK_PATH%\extract.exe" "%FORM_PATH%" myschema.xsd >/nil

echo Replacing file...
copy myschema.xsd "%XSD_PATH%" >/nil

echo Checking file in...
"%TF_PATH%\tf.exe" checkin "%XSD_PATH%" /login:%TFS_USERNAME%,%TFS_PASSWORD% /noprompt /comment:"Automated checkin from XsdExtractor script" >/nil

goto %RETURN%

:FINISH_BATCH