I’ve had a chance to email back and forth with Mary Jo Foley regarding being quoted in Microsoft-Watch newsletter. She sent me a copy of last week’s article where she links to Don’s opinion of InfoPath and directly quotes Clemens. So my comment about only quoting the guy with something negative to say was wrong, and thus I retract it and apologize. There was also some confusion regarding my opinion of InfoPath as a front-end blogging tool. I was commenting on InfoPath’s suitability (or lack thereof) as a general development tool, not as a weblog front end. I think that InfoPath would rock as a front-end blog tool – I’m just frustrated by the current lack of documentation.

BTW, Scoble had this to say:

Ahh, Harry Pierson is quoted by Mary Jo Foley and asks what I think of all this. Definitely it’s the new world. I imagine there’ll be a day when I get quoted about something or another that NEC is doing. It sure would be nice, though, if journalists always include a link in their articles back to the source. That way we can always put it back in context for people who want more information. Main-stream press folks, though, rarely link to outside resources. Why is that? They don’t want their readers to leave. It’s yet another reminder, though, that what you say online is important and may be used against you at some time in a future. It’s a wacky new world, that’s for sure. Be careful out there.
[The Scobleizer Weblog]

I wanted to point out that while “main-stream press folks rarely link”, the same can’t be said of Mary Jo. The newsletter includes links to all of the relevant blog entries. They’re using a redirect server so the links in the newsletter are routed though them, but the user ends up on the blog entry in question. Also, Microsoft-Watch has an RSS feed, which I’ve now subscribed to.

Robert, are you going to add “Let’s be careful out there” to your manifesto? I’ll hum the theme to Hill Street Blues…

Microsoft-Watch jumped on the blog bandwagon by creating a list of MSFT bloggers. It’s been very popular – I’ve had 467 referrals from them since they posted the list. Apparently, there’s also a newsletter, which had its latest issue come out on this past Friday. A friend sent me a copy indicating that “Dude, you’re famous”. They quoted my recent blog entry regarding InfoPath as a developer tool almost entirely. They mention Chris, Dare and Don and the work they’ve been doing in blogspace, but don’t quote any of them. They only quoted the guy with something slightly negative to say.

In a way, this is to be expected. I mean, I’m following Rule #1 of Robert Scoble’s Corporate Weblog Manifesto: Tell The Truth. And nobody reads a news letter like Microsoft-Watch to only hear how great things are going for Microsoft. I shouldn’t be surprised that they quoted me. (I am, however, surprised at the turnaround performance – I only posted the entry about 24 hours before it ended up in the newsletter.) And certainly, if I’m going to keep a blog like this, the press should be allowed to quote from it. However, I feel that should have received a heads up email to let me know I was being quoted out of context with the rest of the blog-thread in a newsletter that people pay for. Unlike many of the other MSFT bloggers, I work in the field directly with customers every day. I’m sure I’ve got a customer or two who will see this. If my friend hadn’t clued me in, I might have been in for a nasty surprise when I return from Infant Care Leave this coming week.

I finally got around to upgrading to Office 2003 Beta 2. Now I need to move from FrontPage to InfoPath to make blog entries. Too bad there is almost no documentation. Plus, I share Early Adopter’s frustration that it’s script based instead of CLR based. I think Don’s enthusiasm for InfoPath has inflated expectations a bit. InfoPath is from the Office group, not the VS.NET group. It’s an eForms tool, not an application development tool. And last but not least, it’s a 1.0 product. I think that InfoPath is a great start, but I’m not sure it’s the second coming of VB.

I want to break open than .xsn file and start playing with the schema, transforms and other XML docs stored in there. If they are all XML, then it should be possible to repurpose the files for alternative usage.

I seem to have picked up some googles looking for “plus DME crack”. <sigh> When I mentioned “crack” I was talking about my wife’s chicken enchiladas, not piracy. Still, I seem to be in the top 10 sites featuring those words…

Kudos to Scott W & TripleASP.NET’s Show My Code tool. I updated the source code to my articles so the sample code would be syntax color coded. I like it. Not 100% satisfied w/ the output – I did hand tool the results a bit. Maybe there could be an option to spit out an XML adorned version of the source code? Then I could put the <br> tags exactly where I wanted them via an XSLT.

Speaking of XSLT, FrontPage 2003 is supposed to have an XSLT graphical editor. But from some basic looking around, it appears that it only works in conjunction a SharePoint based site. Too bad, I was hoping it would compete with Altova’sStylevision graphical XSLT editor. Given the relatively high bar for XSLT development, and Office 2003′s support of XML in general and XSL in particular, I thought that FrontPage might naturally evolve into an XSLT tool.

Anyone know where WordML schema is documented?