Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome to the Carnage4Life Show

April 10, 2003

@ 12:58 AM

A Bob Bob Bob A Bob Bob Abooey style

A few days ago I read Mike Harsh's blog entry about breaking changes and compatibility. This is probably the biggest cause of consternation for me in the course of my day to day activities. As Mike said on one end of the spectrum "every bug you fix is a breaking change". This should be slightly amended to every bug you fix which changes the previous behavior is a breaking change. For people like me who are dependent on external standards like W3C XML Schema this can be quite painful. Since the working group is not as constrained by such concerns for backwards or forwards compatibility they publish many significant errata which change the behavior of schema processors.

Every one of these errata that changes the behavior of formerly compliant schema processors , such as E2-12 which changes the lexical form of xs:gMonth from --MM-- to --MM, has to go through several layers of approval where backwards compatibility and thus breaking our customer's applications is weighed against to-the-letter spec compliance. Sometimes spec compliance wins, sometimes it loses.

I remember being in college and wondering why the fucktards at Microsoft couldn't do something as simple as read a spec and implement it correctly even after several releases. Things are a little clearer now.
This month's Extreme XML column on enabling XPath querying over object graphs is a good example of the power of XML Everywhere. It was quite a journey getting Steve's article on MSDN, not only did it have to go through the regular tech review from myself and others on the team but legal review from both Dell and MSDN as well. It was definitely worth it.

To keep the article simple it doesn't go as far as it could in showing the power of XML Everywhere. For instance one could query and combine information from the three angles of the data triangle relational <-> objects <-> XML (ROX) with the current tools in the .NET Framework. Data provided by an XPathNavigator over an object graph, an XmlDocument object containing an XML file and an XmlReader returned by querying SQL Server via ADO.NET or SQLXML can be combined and processed in a single XSLT stylesheet using the XslTransform class.

XML Everywhere, a single unified data model for all your information processing needs. I can't wait until we ship XQuery.
Christophe Lauer posts about a the annoying way Messenger can popup at the most inopportune times. What I like best about Messenger is the fact that the application thinks it is so important that as long as Outlook or Outlook Express are open it can't be closed either. This is only topped by the lack of an invisible option so people online can't see me but I can see them. This feature is so useful when it comes to ensuring that you don't get interrupted but catch the people you need to talk to.
No day is complete without listening to some Star Wars Gangsta Rap [flash movie].
Andy Santo is yet another one of our users who's complained about how cumbersome it is to perform XPath queries involving namespaces. Besides the fact that his 6 lines of code doesn't need the line
xmlGdiNamespaceManager.AddNamespace("ns2", "urn:MyNamespace2")
he can do more simplify it. He can change his code to
xmlData.LoadXml(XmlString) xmlCommandCollection = xmlData.SelectNodes("//*[local-name()='CommandCollection']/*")
which will probably perform less efficiently but is back to two lines of code. We are investigating ways to make XPath querying involving namespaces to be easier in future versions of the .NET Framework without adding unexpected complexity or creating situations where people end up getting false positives.
According to Google, I am the most popular Obasanjo on the Web. I've heard Andy complain in the past about Google's popularity contest style of ranking web search results and the me coming up before my dad in a web search seems to have me beginning to see his point.

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Disclaimer: The above comments do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my employer. They are solely my opinion.