Just had a great time at Scott Hanselman's talk on Advanced System.Xml at the North Dallas .NET User Group. It was a fantastic tour through the features available, especially spending time on XmlReader.In particular I loved how his conversation started with "What makes Xml special?" Responses from the crowd were great (obviously there was a point here which I'll get to in a moment)"It's Well-Formed...."To which Scott suggested that the following was also well-formed:FIRST,LASTTim,RayburnAnd that hence this was not:FIRST,LASTTim,Ray,burn"It's a standard..."To which Scott suggested that he start a company espousing CSV as a standard which could be accepted.There were many more things which were thrown out, but the point was to drive home that Xml is about the Infoset or PSVI (Post Schema Validated Infoset). In other words it is not about the angle brackets but rather about a described structure which can be validated. And that if you're writing code which requires you to know that angle brackets exist, then you're writing code wrong.In all, great talk. It was a personal thrill to meet Scott, I've read him for several years on his blog and I've got no doubt I make more money now because I've read his blog.
Alright, so it's a bit of boasting on myself but I'm happy to say that officially as of yesterday I've been added as a Developer on NUnit.If you know me, you know I believe firmly in Test Driven Development and I've been contributing for some time now to the NUnit project.Well Charlie Pool extended the offer and I've accepted the position to become a Developer on the project officially.What does it change?Very little, I'll still be writing code for this great tool just like I was before this but it does make me feel like my contributions to the project have been of a high quality and that people appreciate the time I've dedicated to it.
Recently I've been working with a system that involves an externally facing server acting as a Gateway for another internal box, in this case a BizTalk Server. This system as such runs into the glorious problem with .NET 1.1 limiting the maximum number of outbound HTTP connections to 2 by default. This could impact performance but this far hasn't been a problem. This system has been working reasonably well for some time, but now there is a desire to change the model of communication from one of submitted requests which receive asynch responses to getting synch responses. This means connection lifetime will increase, and as such the number of simultaneous connections had better rise with it or scalability will go to hell. The place this needs to be changed is in the machine.config file for .NET 1.1 and specifically you are looking for the maxconnection element, which defaults to 2.
