mikechampion's weblog

There’s lots of news about Apache Stonehenge today. First, the effort passed a significant milestone – its first release from the Apache incubator. This means that the code was updated to use the Apache license headers, the source control and build environment...

Several of us at Microsoft have signed up to actively participate in the Apache Stonehenge Project that was accepted into the incubator recently. This is only the latest in a number of open source interoperability projects in which Microsoft is active...

Successive versions of the .NET framework closely track the evolution of the WS-* specs as they progress from publication, to submissions to W3C or OASIS, and ultimately as W3C Recommendations or OASIS Standards. See for example the list of supported...

My previous post used WS-Management to illustrate the larger point that "the WS technologies are taking hold, deep down in the infrastructure, doing the mundane but mission critical work for which they were designed." Perhaps because WS-Management is...

There's a persistent theme talked up by WS-*ophobes that it's all just a fad , rapidly sliding down toward the "Trough of Dilillusionment" in the Gartner Hype Cycle . I've come to the opposite conclusion after six weeks back in the web services world...

A team within Microsoft ran an "app week" recently to build applications that implement customer scenarios using a variety of LINQ technologies. The feedback on LINQ to XML was uniformly positive. The participants were not XML geeks, but more like our...

There is a lot of interesting (and once confidential) stuff that came out of the Mix conference this week. Jon Udell's " Watching Anders Hejlsberg reinvent the relationship between programs and data" ... offers an enthusiastic summary: A lot of the time...

After an enjoyable and extremely educational 2 1/2 years on the core XML team in SQL Data Programmability at Microsoft, I've moved to a position in the Connected Systems Division's Interoperability unit. Responsibilities include representing Microsoft...

I had a lot of time to think about Elliotte Harold's call for XML predictions on the way home from Redmond Wednesday night. We got several inches of snow, which is rare here and the highway folks just can't deal with . There were massive traffic tieups...

I don't really want to perpetuate the 5 things meme, but DonXML asked nicely (and I'll take the opportunity to shamelessly plug some favorite people, products, and organizations): I came to the software industry rather late in life after a mis-spent youth...

After seeing Douglas Crockford's talk on JSON at XML 2006 recently, I figured that some sort of great debate between XML and JSON advocates was brewing. I had been waiting for Elliotte Harold's rebuttal of what Crockford is missing, but haven't seen it...

Lots of people linked to the happy news last week that Jon Udell was joining Microsoft , so I didn't bother. I have previously recommended his great interview with Anders Hejlsberg . This is a clear, concise, hands-on demonstration of LINQ (including...

My favorite conundrum, the difficulty of being simple , pops up everywhere I look these days. OpenXML document format vs the Open Document Format Point: OpenXML is so complex no one else can implement it . Counterpoint: Its complexity is due to the existing...

I could only attend half the conference due to a family health issue, but here are some thoughts on what I did see. The links are mainly to the conference program; I believe the entries will eventually link to the actual presentation slides and submitted...

[minor editorial updates 11/13] We've been doing some formal usability testing on all the LINQ components over the last couple of months and have learned a lot about what people find challenging. The results have generally validated LINQ's story as...

Oleg Tkachenko has a nice post comparing the StAX (java) and XmlReader (.NET and XmlLite) approaches to streaming over a potentially large XML data source and filtering out unwanted elements. He concludes: if you work with StAX you can readily work...

[updated to escape the code so that it displays properly in HTML, and so that it gracefully handles input with an XML declaration] Several people have asked for a feature in LINQ to XML that would keep track of the line number in an XML data source...

Joel Spolsky has an interesting post on the Language Wars -- the permanent debate among those who think their currently preferred programming language is the best. He drew some heat from the blogosphere because he advocates a pragmatic approch for others...

Brian Beckmann has a Channel 9 interview in which he describes operating as a " Mort " programmer during his academic cosmology career. You might think that someone who programs to solve real day job problems in the most expedient way possible wouldn...

A few weeks ago I pulled together a post on LINQ to XML in action . I came across a couple more very nice examples over the weekend. One is from the LINQ Project forum . A question was posed asking about a clean way to to load a structured text file such...

In a previous post I wrote: There is no guarantee that XLinq classes can be subclassed effectively, although there are currently no plans to seal them. The recommended way for applications to add functionality to XLinq is by using the annotation feature...

Once upon a time, I filled a little void in my life -- the one that many people fill with weblogs -- with the xml-dev mailing list . For some reason due perhaps to my generation, or the way my head is wired, I find it easier to pull together an email...

Don't feel bad if you don't know what the Halloween problem is. According to the Transact SQL Blog , it's the basis for an interview question that only guru level database programmers can be expected to answer: Halloween protection is needed to...

One of the worst pitfalls a design team can fall into is trying to do too much. The principle is captured by the well known quote: Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. - Antoine...

There's been a lot of discussion about the recent decision not to ship WinFS as a distinct product, but instead to incorporate its technologies into ADO.NET and SQL Server. I don't have much to contribute to the discussion about WinFS itself since I didn...