January 31, 2005

Weekend Summary - XQuery, XQuery, XQuery - My "New Best Friend of the Day" award and other fun stuff from this weekend

I've spent a majority of this weekend whackin' at some code for the site as well as preparing for phase 2 of the project, integration into Saxon.NET. There are still some features to finish on the side in regards to the client but I am quickly approaching the stage where I am in desperate need of some server-side functionality to enhance the client-side user experience. So I plan to wrap-up the remaining bits of the client today and then plan ahead to the server side integration for tomorrow. In the mean time, here is a summary of the news from this weekend. NOTE: I have created a raw news feed for the site available in Atom, RSS/RDF, and RSS 2.0 versions. This is an extremely raw feed and will eventually become somewhat automated. I don't recommend adding it to your reader unless you REALLY want everything that is XML/XSLT/XPath/XQuery coming in a rapid pace each and every day of the week.

Five IT Pilots Going 'Production Grade' in '05

Some interesting comments on the events to prepare for in 2005. XQuery is one of them. It might be a good idea to take into account the recent posting of Mike Champion in regards to this as this needs to be considered when thinking in terms of Microsoft and XQuery. This is Mike's follow-up to the official announcment from Soumitra Sengupta and Charlie Heinemann on MSDN. It seems that, for now, XQuery's future in production Microsoft products will reside within the SQL Server framework, a move that I completely and totally agree with as the need for an XQuery-like interface into SQL Server has been needed for a very long time. I am glad to see that this is something that Microsoft has deemed as important enough to ship pre-recommended spec. while at the same time recognizing that the development community was not completely in line with their decision to move forward with an XQuery/XSLT 1.0 solution for the future. Which reminds me... I have an award to give out.

Can I have the envelope please... In the category of "My New Best Friend for the Day" the award goes to... Oh my gosh we have a tie!

The *AWARDS* go to Mike Champion, Michael Rys, Soumitra Sengupta, Charlie Heinemann, and the Microsoft Corportation in general! Whoo Hooo!!!!

It's getting close to the end of the business day so I am going to publish this now and then keep adding to the news from the weekend and republish it again when I'm done...