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Showing posts from December, 2010

Joys of XML Serialization

Love it or hate it, XML is everywhere and for data and objects, it can be extremely useful. On one of my last projects, a colleague introduced me to the useful XSD2Code project, which creates a .Net object from an XSD. This made it easy for him to build a structure that could be compiled into code to ensure everyone followed the same structure. This is extremely valuable if someone gives you an XSD as a format to write to and you want to populate it using an object. In a more recent project, we needed to share details from a component with another calling application via a web service. Enter XMLSerializer, the .Net equivalent of taking an object and dumping it into XML. Dim s As XmlSerializer = New XmlSerializer(Object) Dim w As New StringWriter() s.Serialize(w, Object) return w.tostring Sounds great, right? It was for a short time, but as the object got bigger, it contained more collections and references to other objects. Eventually, the Serialize method took up 100% of

Where are my features?

Here's an innovative way to show your customers where certain features are at in the development cycle. FreeAgent Depot — A furtive glance behind the wizard's curtain How well do you communicate with your clients about upcoming features?