DonXML Blog

M. David (on his XSLTBlog) asks why some of us are drawn to XSLT and has a great quote (well sort of quote) from Tim Bray from a late night drinking session at XMLDevCon:

If you are looking for information on installing, configuring, and troubleshooting SQL Server Replication, and need more than just the documentation (and who doesn’t), then there is just one place to get it, and that is SQL Server MVP Hilary Cotter’s new book, A Guide to SQL Server 2000 Transactional and Snapshot Replication.  If you are using SQL Server Replication, and do not have this book, then you are definitely doing things the hard way.

Thom Robbins is a great guy, but unfortunately for him he has bumped into one of my major pet peeves, Viral Coding Examples with his Introducing the XmlTextReader post.  It really isn’t his fault, since the code he uses is very similar to the code example in the XmlTextReader.Read()  documentation, and I complained about that code to the System.Xml team at the MVP Summit.  I did promise to write something up on it, and Thom’s post finally got me to do it (it has been months since I promised to write this up).

I’ve been trying (with help from ScottW and the local MS DEs) to start up a new user group in NJ, but I’ve run into a couple problems, the most important is the lack of a standard meeting date that does not intrude on the pre-existing user groups.  The problem is a good one to have, since it means that the developer community is of sufficient size to support more focused user groups (rather than the typical general purpose groups).  But by focusing the user group on one topic, it also limits its potential audience, so we need to make it available to a larger group of developers.  What I was thinking of doing is to create 3 new user groups (or one big one with 3 different tracks) which all meet at the same location, just separate rooms.  The 3 groups would be an Asp.Net group, a SQL Development DBA group (for folks who write sprocs and DTS packages, OLAP and such, geared towards the new Yukon dev stuff) and a traditional SQL Server Support DBA group (for the traditional backup/recovery/performance stuff).  Then, instead of meeting every month on a weeknight, meet once a quarter on a Saturday morning and have 3 presentations per group (or track) which would mean 9 sessions in total.  The idea is that most folks can't travel more than 20 miles on a weeknight because that is about an hour commute time (thanks to traffic), so a Saturday morning (with no traffic) would mean that people could travel further.  But who wants to give up 1 Saturday morning a month?  So if we have 3 sessions on a quarterly basis we could meet once a quarter, and still cover the same amount of material, and only have to give up 1 Saturday a quarter.

I’ve been extremely busy since coming back from Vegas, and even caught a little flack for not posting more quality stuff (and I agree, the quality isn’t there at the moment, but just wait until you see what I’ve been working on).

Joe Fawcett (fellow XML MVP) came across a great example (from the Microsoft.Public.Xml newsgroup) of one of my biggest pet peeves, “We (the community) are doing a very poor job teaching the average developer how to use XML properly in .Net”. 

Congrats to Scott Watermasysk!  He was recently awarded the Microsoft Regional Director designation for New Jersey (the first for NJ).  

eWeek Senior Writer, Darryl Taft contacted me last week and asked about how I’d feel if Microsoft dropped Avalon from the Longhorn release, and then put some of my comments in this article.  He mentioned that he had a quote from a Microsoft exec inferring that it may happen, but I didn’t realize that it was a quote from Soma Somasegar.  My full comment was: