As many of you may heard Visual Studio 2005 SP1 was officially released several days ago. There have already been a couple of blog posts announcing the release from ScottGu and Soma . One item of feedback I saw on those posts was a request for more information about the actual fixes in SP1. I'm writing this blog post to provide more information about the SP1 fixes in the "web tools" area -- specifically those pieces of Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Web Developer 2005 Express used to target ASP.NET. I'll also include a list of bug fixes we made to "web tools" so people can have more detail into what was fixed. NOTE: the information here only pertains to "web tools" in Visual Studio 2005, and does not represent everything that was fixed in SP1...(read more)

An announcement of a new O'Reilly conference that will be of interest to XML.com readers.

Creating XML languages that are compatible and extensible is a difficult problem. This week David Orchard argues for a theory of compatibility in which he describes some of the conditions for creating compatible XML languages.

Thanks for reading my blog this year. I think I am taking a blogging break for the next week or two.

One of the questions I'm often asked is whether it is possible to run an ASP.NET web-site project as a top-level root "/" site using the built-in VS web-server and the VS 2005 Web Site Project model. By default, when you open a web-site as a file-system based web site project and run it, VS will launch and run the built-in web-server using a virtual app path that equals the project's root directory name. For example: if you have a project named "Foo", it will launch and run in the built-in web-server as http://localhost:1234/Foo/ What a lot of people want to-do instead is to just run the web-site as http://localhost:1234/ or (if port 80 isn't already in use): http://localhost/ Doing this can make site navigation and url handling logic much simpler...(read more)

The CSS1 recommendation was published on 17 December 1996, and the W3C has announced they're celebrating CSS's tenth anniversary by releasing a new version of the W3C online CSS validator, and by inviting developers to submit contributions to the CSS10...

Well, 2006 is pretty much in the bag at this point. Tomorrow will be my last day here in the office for the year. Microsoft empties out quickly this time of year as people start getting to the point where they need to take vacation or lose it at the end of the year (we can only carry-over a certain amount), which for me basically happens at EOD today. Wow, hard to believe this will the 10th time I've been around Microsoft for the holidays (come to think of it, I think for my first time I was actually at Microsoft for the holidays...) The experience of building and managing this project has taken a direction I really never expected. My original vision for this team was to do smallish projects every 3-6 months, to involve the community, and to...(read more)

We just moved into our new building here on campus (we moved from 42 (good) to 17 (not so good)). I've spent most of the day unpacking so far, and haven't gotten much else done yet. Though I'm back to a window office. I'm right at the edge here on getting a window office. I've been here 5.5 years, and 5 seems to be about the magic number for this tema. The question now becomes how long will I get to keep it until someone more senior comes along. In any event, this new building is interesting. The view out of my window is great, the fact that I CANNOT find the stairs for the life of me, drives me up the wall. I'm the kind of guy who doesn't like taking an elevator for less than 5 floors. I'm on the third, so I'd rather take the stairs. In this...(read more)

Hi All,

When running the code below I get the following error. any idea...

ERROR - [soap-service] - AxisFault Cause: Server did not

Last night we launched the Community Recognition Program for the www.asp.net site, which seeks to recognize each person’s contribution to the site. Historically the greatest contribution has been in the forums, where many people moderate and answer questions from developers. More recent initiatives include the ability for people to submit articles for the home page, to provide suggestions for content (see the Videos page), to vote on polls (see the By the Community, For the Community program), and to publish weblog entries (see the Community Blogs page). Then with the launch of the German , Spanish , French and Chinese foreign-language sites, there are even more levels of contributions that people are making to the site. The Community Recognition...(read more)

Our SearchDomino.com tip contest runs through the end of December. Here is a list of the current contenders -- a smorgasbord of 20 Notes/Domino development tips from our members. Read them, rate them. Your votes determine the winners.

The majority of programming languages delimit the main program section. But this isn't the case with JScript.NET or JavaScript. In this tip, SearchDomino.com member Chandra Teja offers code that you can place anywhere in your JScript.NET class definitions to delimit the main code.

The topic of separating your "personal life" versus "work life" is nothing new. ?There have always been people that work too many hours, don't take enough vacation, miss their child's soccer game or dance recital, or are late for that special dinner with their spouse. ? But is today's "always connected" world making the situation better or worse? ? This is an area I am reading a lot about, both for my IBM job and for my personal interest.

Last week while in Florida I had my first experience traveling with my BlackBerry Pearl. ? Here is how I visualize the options it provided me.


The vertical black arrow is about where I think I was on the scale. ?My goal was to not let work take away anything from my vacation, but also do enough little things to allow myself to come back without being completely overloaded. ?Here was my approach:

1. Delete all "news" type of emails. ?I get dozens of emails a day which provide me industry related content. ?Normally I can spend a few hours a day reading these emails and the linked articles they contain. ?I decided this was a no no while on vacation, so I simply deleted all these emails without even opening them. ?If something Earth shattering happened in the industry while I was away, I figured I'd hear about it when I got back!

2. During downtime, respond to email from family and friends.

3. If I still had time after #2, then take a look at my work email. ? If there was a question I could easily answer, then I did. ?If the question involved any amount of research, forwarding of attachments, reviewing content, creating a presentation, etc. than I deleted it from my BlackBerry but not my server's mail file. ?This way it did not worry me while I was away but I could still work on it when I got back.

4. I logged onto the various chat clients during downtimes. ?A few minutes a day of "keeping in touch" was permitted, and welcomed since I was traveling alone.

5. I read a few blogs via the BlackBerry's browser, but certainly no where near as many as I do while at home.

6. I played Texas Hold'em on the phone when I had nothing else to do! :-)

So overall, I have to say having the BlackBerry was a nice thing. ?I did not have to turn on my laptop and find (and pay for) an internet connection, but I could still keep in touch with friends, family, and yes do just a bit of work.

There have been many articles and blogs written about the social effects of devices such as BlackBerrys. ?The most impacting to me is a recent Wall Street Journal story called BlackBerry Orphans. ? It discusses how the tide has turned, and now instead of parents telling their kids to stop playing video games and study, kids are telling their parents to stop looking at the Blackberry and instead spend time with them. ?The article contained a story were a 4 year old girl saw her mother unhappy, so she brought over her mom's BlackBerry and asked "Mommy, will this make you feel better?" ? Scary, very scary. ? I suggest you read it.

For me it comes down to one thing, Do you "work to live" or "live to work"? ?Personally I think "work life balance" should be changed to "life work balance". ?Your life should always come first, work is just a way to pay for it. ? Don't get me wrong, I really enjoy my job. ?I work hard at it, and am proud of what I accomplish. ?But my life is about friends, family, travelling the world, playing sports, taking pictures, ........

Here is more of the fake coverage of the XML 2006 conference. Like Groundhog Day, we get to start from day one again and do it differently now that some more papers are up....

DMOZ editors can now log in and start editing again, but new submissions are still down.

Hi,

we are working with XML files that can be as big as 6Mb. Some XML documents that obey to a certain condition must be duplicated where only

VS 2005 SP1 shipped on the web last week . One of the overall goals with VS 2005 SP1 was to improve IDE performance and responsiveness for a number of common scenarios (a few examples: build times, managing large projects, refactoring, and intellisense). For web-scenarios, we specifically worked on the performance of the HTML source editor - especially with cases involving large HTML documents or slower machines. Below are a few specific changes we made in SP1 to improve performance in this area: 1) We tuned the performance of the HTML Validation feature (to learn more about this feature read this old post of mine ). Validation of large documents now happens faster, and will not impact typing or updates as much (whereas previously validation...(read more)