March 29, 2004
@ 09:07 PM
Comments [4]
XML Developer Center on MSDN Launched

After talking about it for the past few weeks the XML Developer Center on MSDN is finally here. As mentioned  in my previous post on the Dev Center the most obvious changes from the previous incarnation of http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml are

  1. The XML Developer Center will provide an entry point to working with XML in Microsoft products such as Office and SQL Server.

  2. The XML Developer Center will have an RSS feed.

  3. The XML Developer Center will pull in content from my work weblog.

  4. The XML Developer Center will provide links to recommended books, mailing lists and weblogs.

  5. The XML Developer Center will have content focused on explaining the fundamentals of the core XML technologies such as XML Schema, XPath, XSLT and XQuery.

  6. The XML Developer Center will provide sneak peaks at advances in XML technologies at Microsoft that will be shipping future releases of the .NET Framework, SQL Server and Windows.

As mentioned in my previous post the first in a series of articles describing the changes to System.Xml in version 2.0 of the .NET Framework is now up. Mark Fussell has published What's New in System.Xml for Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0 Release which mentiones the top 10 changes to the core APIs in the System.Xml namespace.

There is one cool new addition that is missing from Mark's article, which I guess would be number 11 of his top 10 list. The XSD Inference API which can be used to create an XML Schema definition language (XSD) schema from an XML instance document will also be part of System.Xml in Whidbey. Given the enthusiasm we saw in various parties about XSD inference we decided to promote it from just being a freely downloadable tool to being part of the .NET Framework. Below are a couple of articles about XSD Inference 

If you have any thoughts about what you'd like to see on the Dev Center or any comments on the new design, please let me know.


 

Categories: XML

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Monday, 29 March 2004 22:52:56 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Everything looks great. I would suggest adding a link to http://msdn.microsoft.com/sqlxml (since you do link to the sqlxml newsgroup).
Bryant Likes
Monday, 29 March 2004 23:13:13 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
The RSS posts in the column under your picture are hard to read. The code snippets are crowded to fit the column, shouldn't the content be present in another wider column?
Phil
Tuesday, 30 March 2004 04:11:02 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Great site. It's already proven useful to me. I used it to locate an article on using default namespaces with XPath -- a topic that had me scratching my head for several hours yesterday while my perfectly reasonable (and simple) XPath query insisted on returning null instead of a valid XmlNode.

Thanks again, and great work!
Steve Clarke
Tuesday, 30 March 2004 11:44:59 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Great. Hope this Dev Center will grow successfully.

Personally I think it too tightly focused on:
- core XML technologies
- XML technologies at Microsoft

What I would like to see on the Dev Center, is a broader coverage, of "Marginal/exotic" topics like:
- Anything about MetaData:
- Semantic Web
- Categorization/Classification
- MetaData extraction/gathering
- Integrating disparate data sources, such as:
- Legacy data
- SQL Server Meta-Data Services
- XML data
- Oracle DB Data
- XML for Analysis data

Would like/need emphasys on
- Building real-world applications, with the technologies available now
- Avoiding the perfect/academic-only approaches
- Applying XML technologies wisely/effectively

Best regards
Me
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