I watched Don’s MSDN TV talk on passing XML around within a managed application. The value of XPathNavigaor has been discussed in blogsphere, but it was nice to see it explained by the master.

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It reminded my of one of my first encounters with Don. I was a recent addition to MCS in SoCal and we were having a team meeting / training at DevelopMentor. Among other speakers, Don was scheduled to discuss the then-brand-new SOAP spec. As is expected with Don, the presentation started with thirty minutes of “look what cool code I whipped up at 3am this morning”. In this case, the code was a COM based SAX parser based on expat. In his implementation, Don had mirrored the SAX API exactly, including providing the setXxxHandler methods. I asked him why he hadn’t used COM Events. He commented that I had really drunk the kool-aid and that was the end of it.

Personally, I hate registration API’s like SAX’s setXxxHandler methods. While COM Events has a lot of plumbing overhead to get nailed up, but the benefit was that it provided a late bound mechanism for locating event sources. Using registration API’s like setXxxHandler means having to redefine your interface to support new event types. Of course, CLR delegates, the pull model XmlReader and XPathNavigator have made the registration API vs. COM events discussion moot.

Interesting follow up to this story: I ran into Don at an internal event last November. He couldn’t remember my name, but he remembered the event at DM and that I was the one who asked about that COM events stuff.

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I just sat thru the flash demo for BizTalk Server 2004. While it’s pretty fluffy, it did show glimpses of the new BTS tools integrated into VS.NET and integration with InfoPath for supporting human based workflows. Cool stuff. Downloading from MSDN Subscriber Downloads as I blog.

Got to Phoenix only to discover I had left the charger for my development laptop (otherwise known as my “portable server”). Since I’m here to talk code, maybe having a working laptop is a good idea. (My tablet is going to be a good dev machine, but I haven’t gotten it entirely configured yet). I drove around a while, looking for a replacement AC adapter. Found what I thought was a Fry’s Electronics, but was actually a Fry’s Food & Drug. Luckily, there was a Best Buy nearby. No AC adapter, but they did have the T2: Extreme Edition on sale so I picked it up. I eventually found a universal AC adapter after visiting two Radio Shacks, but frankly I wanted to check out T2. Unfortunately, the “player recommendation” indicate that laptops don’t play the hi-def version “due to the amount of data transfer required”. They weren’t kidding. But even without being able to watch the hi-def version (for now), it’s got lots of great features. Audio commentary by James Cameron, lots of new documentaries and on-the-set footage. Favorite toy: the Terminator FX studio. You can import your own photos and either make morph videos into the T1000 or create a “battle damaged” T800. I only have pictures of my son with me, so I made a cool, but disturbing, photo of him as a T800 with part of the cybernetics showing through.

I was looking up something on the VS.NET site when I noticed a link to PowerToys for VS.NET 2003. There are currently 5 PowerToys available:

• VSTweak – Allows you to modify some of the more obscure VS.NET options and settings
• VSEdit – Command line tool to load a file into currently running instance of VS.NET
• VSWindowManager – Enables you to design your own custom window layouts
• Custom Help Builder – allows you to create a custom help collection for your XML-style commented Visual Basic or Visual C# class library. Integrates the custom help collection into the VS.NET help system
• VB Commenter – XML-style comment tags for VB

Future tools include:

• VSCMDShell Window – One window to access both the VS.NET Commands Window and your external CMD.exe process.
• VSMouseBindings – Assign all five mouse buttons to commands within VS.NET
• VSTransparency – Make floating windows and pop-up UI semi-transparent in the IDE giving you a better view of the code below

Sweet!

After weeks of not getting around to it, I fired up my Media-Center-in-process. I got a copy of the Do Amazing Things DVD, which has Hi-Def Windows Media versions of BMW Films series of short films. Mostly, I wanted to see if my underpowered (733MHz Pentium 3) could handle the Hi-Def feed. Short answer: it doesn’t. So do I want to buy new CPU/MB/Memory and rebuild my system just to be able to watch Terminator 2: Judgment Day in Hi-Def on my big screen TV? Short answer: not yet, but soon. Given Windows Media’s focus on digital cinema tools, I imagine that T2 will be just the first of many movies available in Hi-Def Windows Media.