I got a pointer to Mondrain off the Dotnet-sscli mailing list yesterday. Mondrain is one of a few functional languages implementations for .NET. There’s also some interesting study of CodeDom, including a formal description of the grammar. Just the thing for building Disruptive Programming Language Technologies.

A lot has been made of InfoPath and its impact on XML development. But the other Office 11 apps have great XML support as well. InfoPath might be great as a web service front end, but it would be a poor choice for a long XML document. For example, Martin Fowler wrote his latest book using XML, providing him a way to use the same XML source to generate web pages and printed pages. Martin uses XEmacs, but he could use Word 11. Word docs can have XML schemas associated with them. When you save these docs as XML, the custom schema information is embedded in the Word XML format (called WordML). Alternatively, you can choose to “save data only” which eliminates all the WordML leaving just the pure XML in the custom schema. You can even apply an XSL Transform during the saving process. Looks like Excel 11 has similar features. And there’s an app named MSOXMLED.exe installed into the Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft\Shared\OFFICE11 directory. According to the version info, its description is “XML Editor”. However, it doesn’t seem to launch, at least in my configuration (Office 11 beta running on Windows Server 2003 RC2 inside a Virtual PC).

As a new dad, I’ve got the requisite digital camera and digital camcorder. So I’ve taken a ton of photos and shot some video, which I shareonline. But it’s nice to have physical copies of the photos for albums, so I bought a new HP 5550 DeskJet printer. I also sprung for the high quality photo paper and the Photo InkJet Cartridge that turns the 4 color printer into a 6 color photo printer. This printer was the PC Magazine’s Editor’s Choice, and after seeing the output, I completely agree. I used to do photo touchup and color correction for a publishing company, and this printer completely blows me away.

Now all I need is a DVD burner to go with my firewire card, 80GB hard drive and Windows Movie Maker.

I finally got around to updating my Web.SkinUI project page. I’ve posted a slightly updated version of the code that allows DB connection strings to be specified in the web.config file. I’ve also posted the code (without docs) from the follow-up article that compiles the skinned pages on request, just like WebForms do. Enjoy.

Does anyone know of predefined conditional compilation directives for C#? I know VS.NET creates “DEBUG” and “TRACE”, but I was wondering if there’s a built-in version conditional? I want to write something like:

#if CLRv1.1
  //...CLR v1.1 specific code...
#else
  //...CLR v1.0 specific code...
#endif