Don Xml's Grok This

While I was away on a short vacation, ScottW announced the long awaited New Jersey Code Camp, that will be held on Oct. 15th.  The site is a little light on content at the moment, but once ScottW gets back from his little vacation, we will add more.  It will be held at the Microsoft Islen NJ location, and for anyone traveling in from out ...

It’s the Sunday after TechEd 2005, and I finally recovered enough to sit down and write up the DonXml TechEd 2005 Hits and Misses. Hit – The Cabanas.  Hands down, my favorite part of TechEd is the cabanas.  The sessions are good, but I’d rather sit down with the presenter for 5 minutes and get all the details, then ...

Sessions by Don Box, Kimberly Tripp, and Scott Hansleman, and the like, are always guaranteed to draw a crowd (and rock), but lesser know people can have great sessions too.  So, I’d like to take some time and point out what I refer to as “hidden gems”.  The names behind the sessions may not be instantly recognizable, ...

3rd Place - ''Social condensers'' -- the place where citizens of a community or neighborhood meet to develop friendships, discuss issues, and interact with others -- have always been an important way in which the community developed and retained cohesion and a sense of identity. My 3rd place does not exist in the normal sense.  I do not ...

I was recently interviewed by Doug Reilly for Simple Talk “The journal for Microsoft technology developers and DBAs” ‘s Geek of the Week feature and it just went live.  Melissa (aka the wife, who is a OLAP and development DBA) wasn’t too happy that I was asked to be a database geek of the week.  Her comment, your ...

I’ve been bugging Miguel to post the details on his self built USB 2.0 powered 7200 rpm drive.  This is a must for anyone using VPC (and if you are not using VPC, you should be).  You can’t beat the price, $200 for the drive, and $20 for the case.  This is a perfect setup for presenting at Code Camps and you local user ...

StylusStudio is my favorite XSLT Editor (I've been using it since version 2.0 and was a beta tester until the company got bought out by Sonic), and their newsletter, The Stylus Scoop, has an interview with Michael Rys on XQuery, SQL 2K5 and MS XML Technologies.

Well, I got the official word, and Microsoft is going to re-up my MVP status in the area of XML, for a second year.  I initially got nominated as an MVP due to a major expansion (and redefinition) of program (last year).  The original idea behind the program (at least what I remember, but could be wrong) was a way of saying thanks to all ...

It looks like I know where I’ll be Sept. 10 thru 17, 2005, in Los Angeles, CA at the next Microsoft PDC (hat tip to Jeff Julian).  PDCs are not like regular technical conferences, they only come along when Microsoft has a new technology to debut.  PDC 2000 was the unveiling of .Net, PDC 2001 was the WebServices (aka MyServices) ...

As a developer sometimes you got to go to extremes to find out what is screwing up code that, on the surface, seems to be perfectly fine, and I’ve spent a more than a couple hours debugging a chunk of code that was misbehaving (and shouldn’t have been).  For my current client, I’m deeply entrenched in building a section of a ...