Archive | August, 2003

Answering earlier comments on Ken’s presentation, the XML/XSL editor he demoed was pretty impressive. Arnold Bilansky, who attended the day’s training, said Ken spent an (CORRECTION: half-)hour demonstrating it to them, but he only had 10 minutes at the end of a whirling two hour demonstration for us. (Ken had to get back to Boston for a 9 PM .NET User Group Meeting. Good thing he was on West Coast time!). Here’s what I recall:

• Color coded editor
• Support XSD, DTD and validates on the fly (little red squiggles under bad attributes and elements)
• Intellisense prompting based on XSD/DTD
• Tooltip prompts
• Preview window to view resultant XML/HTML from transform
• He also demonstrated a 3rd party SVG viewer (emphasizing that it wouldn’t ship with the package) and edited XML and showed the resulting SVG. Impressive.
• XSLT debugging using F5 and tracing line-by-line through the process.
• Expected to ship in “Whidbey” (VS.NET.Next) second half of next year.
• Possibly available as a standalone download in the first half of next year, but no promises. (CLARIFICATION: possibly available as a separate download, but still an add-on to the VS.NET IDE, not a stand-alone product – tr 18-Aug-2003 17:08 ET)

More as I recall it and check with others.

I purchased both Sonic Software’s Stylus Studio (update: corrected URL) and Dave’s WebSite’s XMLEditPro a few weeks ago. It seems to do most of the functionality, in terms of running XML through XSL into a result, and showing how lines of transforms affect the output, but it doesn’t have the slick Intellisense or tooltips, or at least I haven’t found them yet. But it may be a good interim solution to look at while we wait for Microsoft to catch up.

Microsoft Code at Fault for Half of all Windows Crashes You can imagine the SlashDot response to Microsoft’s claim that half of all Windows crashes are the fault of third-party code.

Flamester writes “In a ZDNet Australia story, Microsoft is claiming that half of all MS Windows crashes are the fault of third party code, not their own. That is, according to Dr. Watson. The article also goes into the ‘rigor in which MS tests their products before release’. ”

I am not a technical wizard at the details of the Windows architecture, but my understanding is that there are levels of protection you can develop between the layers of code to prevent a wayward application from crashing the system. In a compromise of performance vs. stability, Microsoft has lowered that protection, and that’s the source of a lot of these problems.

[Slashdot]

I guess you have to move your product somehow. This struck me as a bit bizarre. Microsoft expands Mac Office line with x86 emulator. Cuts prices too [The Register]