September 2008 - Posts
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
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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 always
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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
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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 it's often
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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/#charsets
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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 a
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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
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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
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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
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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 Home
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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
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