Agile Tortoise

.NET

DLR

It’s rare that a Microsoft announcement excites me, but since I do spend a lot of my time coding in, around and for their products, I am excited about the DLR — particularly IronRuby — maturing.

Tuesday, May 1st, 2007. Posted in .NET | No Comments »>

Dynamics AX: Making .NET calls from inside AX

In a typical fashion, Microsoft spent a lot of effort integrating a variety of it's new technologies in Dynamic AX 4 (nee Axapta). Often these additions are of questionable benefit to the end-user/customer -- but, the ability to make direct calls to the .NET/CLR from AX's built in X++ language is pretty handy for [...]

Monday, April 2nd, 2007. Posted in .NET, Dynamics AX | 2 Comments »>

Interesting Microsoft Word XMLNode selection behavior

Since I have not yet passed out from beating my head against the wall, I'd thought I'd report an interesting finding regarding the Microsoft Word object model. The object model includes methods to access content based on embedded XML, but you don't really get a DOM to manipulate those nodes so you have to [...]

Friday, January 5th, 2007. Posted in .NET, C#, OpenXML | No Comments »>

Castle project

Since I seem to stuck in .NET land a lot these days, I think I'll be looking at the Castle project a bit more closely. It has implementations for .NET that mimic the MVC and ActiveRecord setup in Rails.

Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006. Posted in .NET, C#, Ruby on Rails | No Comments »>

Word 2007 - System.IO.FileSystemWatcher followup

Ok, just to followup, I figured out the deal with Word and FileSystemWatcher that I posted about the other day. Don't know why this wasn't obvious to me, but Word, rather than saving a file like 99.9% percent of the applications on the planet do, instead works on a hidden temp file, saves it, [...]

Thursday, November 9th, 2006. Posted in .NET, OpenXML | No Comments »>

OpenXml, back to reality

How do you know when your XML format is too complex? When you are trying to get your data out and your XPath expressions look like:

/w:document/w:body//w:customXml[@w:element = 'WorkOrderQuote']/w:customXmlPr/w:attr[@w:name = 'RecId']/@w:val

Monday, November 6th, 2006. Posted in .NET, OpenXML, XML | No Comments »>

System.IO.FileSystemWatcher and Word 2007

Development can be great fun. Can be. Right at the moment, I feel like I'm beating my head against a wall. I've put together a nice little app to monitor a directory for file changes using .NET's System.IO.FileSystemWatcher.
Works great, mostly. I've been testing all along using "touch" at the command line [...]

Monday, November 6th, 2006. Posted in .NET, OpenXML | 1 Comment »>

Microsoft makes thing simple

Or not. Wow. Something like this has got to be a wake up call to somebody around there that they're technology roadmaps are a friggin' mess!
It's the "Developer Map for the 2007 Microsoft Office System," or, to summarize, a poster which is designed to accomplish a total of 10 goals, including [...]

Saturday, November 4th, 2006. Posted in .NET | No Comments »>

GFI Faxmaker API VB.NET wrapper

This post has gotten me a number of queries over the last couple years, including another today, from people curious about using the GFI Faxmaker COM API. GFI's API is pretty simple, but is unsupported, and compiled in a .exe file that you can't reference from Visual Studio. When the client software is [...]

Wednesday, November 1st, 2006. Posted in .NET | 1 Comment »>

OpenXML and XSL:FO

I'm currently working on a project generating OpenXml documents. OpenXml is Microsoft's new default file format for Office 2007. The format, in general, is a great step forward. For those who haven't looked at it, it's a combination of a packaging standard, and several app specific schemas, WordprocessingML, SpreadsheetML, etc. So, [...]

Friday, October 20th, 2006. Posted in .NET, OpenXML, XSL:FO | No Comments »>

LINQ

Werner Moise has some interesting comments on LINQ, Microsoft's proposed query language integration effort announced at the PDC. I look forward to this functionality being baked into C#. It will make code a lot more compact and readable.

Thursday, September 15th, 2005. Posted in .NET | No Comments »>

Array Covariance Among Enums

Interesting detail on how Enums are treated by the CLR and C#.

Wednesday, July 6th, 2005. Posted in .NET | No Comments »>

DeKlarit RAD

I've been developing a large new project using DeKlarit, a RAD database tool for .NET. I love it! It's a tool for visually modelling your business objects, which automatically takes care of the nitty-gritty of building the database, reorganizing it for updates, maintaining relational integrity, etc. In fact, it does the lion's [...]

Friday, June 24th, 2005. Posted in .NET | No Comments »>

Expert C# Business Objects

Expert C# Business Objects is the best technical book I've read in quite a while. A lot of technical books these days seem like they were rushed to press, or are not very well thoughtout...or are simply reference books. The reference books are very useful in their own way, but rarely help you [...]

Wednesday, February 16th, 2005. Posted in .NET, Books | No Comments »>

It’s live!

The new version of website/webstore that I've been doing for work is now "live." It's been largely done and in-use by a handful of customers for several months, but we finally flipped the switch and moved it over the "www" address. It's a custom .NET site, all written in C# that fully integrates [...]

Thursday, January 6th, 2005. Posted in .NET, Dynamics AX, Work, XML | 4 Comments »> « Previous Entries