Today's post goes into how to generate random numbers in an XSL transform. This is an odd thing to do, because XSLT is usually side-effect-free; pulling random numbers from somewhere usually changes something in the generator, and the end result is that...

A slightly different look, which increases the body width a bit. It's a balancing act between too narrow a column - which makes code snippets wrap and makes them confusing; or too wide a column, which makes it harder to read and scan the text. I'm...

XSLT is used frequently for presentation purposes, for example to turn a data payload into a browser-ready HTML page. A good presentation layer is culture-aware, and this is where things get interesting. By default, the xsl:sort element will sort based...

What are some good XML specifications to get acquainted with? Here are the ones I find myself referring people to the most. Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Fourth Edition) . Close to a must-read, although XML basics are simple enough that...

Recently I've received a question about invalid/illegal/restricted characters in XML, and I thought I'd share some thoughts. To begin with, the definition of characters in the XML 1.0 spec can be found at http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/REC-xml-20060816...

Turns out that one of the email accounts I use for personal use (and occasional business use for various reasons) lost the forwarding settings in April , when my web hoster did an upgrade, and I haven't noticed until now. So I'm going back now over...

Mike Flasko has got a great technical article published at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc907912.aspx . This gives a great comprehensive walk-through of what is available through ADO.NET Data Services, including all sorts of aspects, from setting...

There is a nifty page on MSDN that compares LINQ to XML with other technologies like XmlReader at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb387048.aspx . One thing that the page doesn't mention, however, is that you aren't bound to your decision forever...

Get the full details over at the Project Astoria Team Blog . The short version: an interim release is now available that allows Silverlight 2 Beta 2 clients to talk with ADO.NET Data Services RTM servers. You'll still want to wait for the RTM version...

So, my old home laptop died a while ago, and my beloved wife surprised me with a new one. The new one had Windows Vista 64-bit installed, and that's what I went with. Of course, copying over my data files from my old machine was a snap with Windows...

In the near future, I'll be spending less time on ADO.NET Data Services, and more time on some different technologies. Yes, I'll still blog about ADO.NET Data Services, and I expect I'll still have many email exchanges about it, but eventually you'll...