Rockwell FirstPoint Contact Corp., a global provider of complete call and contact center solutions, announced it has successfully completed a field trial of the Enterprise XML (Extensible Markup Language) Connector with its technology partner, IEX Corporation, a Tekelec company (Nasdaq: TKLC) and the leading provider of contact center workforce management solutions.

Wordtracker founder Andy Mindel chats with John Alexander about how Wordtracker makes use of XML feeds and how technical programmers can take advantage of Wordtracker's new API.

Rockwell FirstPoint Contact Corp., a global provider of complete call and contact center solutions, today announced, at ICCM Chicago (Booth: #1113), it has successfully completed a field trial of the Enterprise XML (Extensible Markup Language) Connector with its technology partner, IEX Corporation, a Tekelec company (Nasdaq: TKLC) and the leading provider of contact center workforce management solutions.

Want to get your groundbreaking extensible markup language-based project some recognition? Better act quickly: The deadline for submitting input for a paper on federal use of XML is tomorrow.

DataPower, the most widely deployed provider of intelligent XML-aware network devices, announced today that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has awarded the company a patent covering its core technology. Filed in 1999, patent # 6,772,413 covers the use of compiler techniques and dynamic code generation for data transformation, including XML processing. The innovations are already key building blocks of DataPower's award-winning products: XS40 XML Security Gateway, XA35 XML Accelerator and XI50 Integration Appliance. The patent is another XML networking industry first by DataPower.

The Web3D Consortium today announced that the X3D specification has been approved by the International Standards Organization (ISO) as International Standard ISO/IEC 19775 with formal publication expected in October 2004. Developed and tested within the Web3D working group process, X3D is the Web3D Consortium's foundation technology for enabling real-time 3D communication across networks and between applications and it was unanimously approved by fourteen national committees within ISO. Web3D/ISO specifications for X3D, a royalty-free standard, are available online at www.web3d.org/x3d/specifications.

In response to my last post (gradients are kicking my ass) DonXML has uploaded versions of his SharpVectors project that will run on the WinHec build. I’ve just started testing it and so far I’m getting mixed results. Some of the gradients translate well and others don’t. It’s probably an issue with the SVG that Adobe is spitting out. Also from the SVG viewer the WCPD is not offering me the Markup option, only the container option. Anyway, it looks promising and it was awful darn nice of Mr. Demsak.

After the taping at XM Radio, Alex & Geddy did a meet & greet session for audience members to get photos and autographs. They had a professional photographer at the event and I just got an e-mail saying the pics are ready.

Now that the InfoPath team has release the new SDK, I am inspired to do something new. I love the fact that we have XmlComments in C# and that it has the support including comments from external files. This makes it easier to separate the comments so that the doc people can work on them without affecting your code.

I'm working on WebDeploy, specifically a single bug I identified while trying to use WebDeploy to deploy Community Server :: Forums last week. The problem is that the VS.NET project file that is used, has a few File elements that contain ampersands within an attribute. Now I realize that you can have ampersands, but they must be in the format of "&", whereas these are just straight "&" in the attribute values.

A small software firm in the farthest corner of the South Pacific has come up with new, loosely-coupled XML-based voice technologies that make it easier and cheaper for architects to design and deploy a wide array of voice-driven web services and integration projects.

A fellow blogger has been talking about hosting the web browsing components of IE as an ActiveX Control. With Whidbey this all goes away and you can now use the Windows Forms 2.0 WebBrowser control. It just drops into place, has a bunch of events for you to handle, includes security model control, and is otherwise the sweetest thing to hit Windows Forms since Halo came out (god how Halo diminished the productivity of such a great team ;-) Anyway, with Halo 2 coming out soon enough don't expect anything better than this to make it into the .NET 2.0 release.

In this section we will look at ways ADO.Net v2.0 (Code named 'Whidbey') allows us to insert/delete/update Xml data values in a table containing Xml column in SQL Server 2005 (Code named 'Yukon'). With earlier versions of the .Net Framework (1.0 and 1.1) the System.Data.SqlClient namespace will consume and emit XML as String values.Because of this, it should not be a surprise that they would behave the same way with Whidbey. This was made so as to not break customers using this new datatype of the Server with older versions of the framework. Note: The examples below use the Customer table defined in the Part I of the blog.

After a long hiatus, let me start with how the new XML data type in SQL Server 2005 is exposed via ADO.Net 2.0. I will discuss this new data type in following parts:

In the earlier sections, we have been looking at Untyped XML which are different from Typed XML. Typed XML data type is an XML defined with an associated xml schema in Sql Server 2005. You may ask if there is anything different on how Typed XML are exposed via ADO.Net 2.0. The answer is a heart-warming NO!. Typed XML are exposed the same way that any untyped XML does through SqlDataReader and SqlParameter. Please note that the check to see if the given XML adheres to the give schema is not done on the client side. This check is done when the statement is executed on the server side.

Stylus Studio, the leading provider of powerful development tools for XML technologies including XML, XSL, XSLT, XML Schema, Web services, SQL/XML, and XQuery, today published an interview with Dr. Michael Kay on emerging XML technologies in its official newsletter, The Stylus Scoop.

Software AG has updated its Tamino XML Server - the industry's first native XML server - to provide accelerated data access, advanced security and expanded query and text retrieval functions.

I recently received a comment from DotNetDave, or someone posting as him. The comment referred to a post I made titled “Removing Namespaces in XML, Security in ASP.NET” in which I updated a link to another post entitled “How do I Remove Namespaces Using XSLT” where I demonstrated how easy it is to create an XmlWriter based class that did not emit XML namespaces called XmlNoNamespaceWriter. Dave said the writer does not work with serialization.

On July 8th, a couple of us from the XML team held a hosted chat on MSDN Chats. The transcripts of the C# and XML chat are now available. We answered questions on our existing behavior in Everett as well as upcoming technologies in Whidbey. If there are any followup questions to those asked during the chat just post them here and I'd love to answer them.

Only two open standards for XML credit reports currently have been adopted, don't be lulled into accepting a proprietary XML format that may entail major resource expenditures to make it compatible with future applications!