Archive for July, 2005

This is super simple but amazingly few developers know CDATA exists. About a year
ago I asked Burr Sutter what was all this CDATA
garbage in messages we were receiving from an (IBM) MQ feed. He told me and I
was stunned I had never heard of it before, I soon said “wow that’ll make my
XML driven interface so much easier in terms of having readable XML”. The XML in question
was full of &lt; for < and &gt; for > – in some cases I was storing
XML inside XML and that can get messy! Take a look at the little example below.. pretty
sweet eh?

<PaulsCDataExample>
  <HardToEncodeString>Paul
Lockwood” &lt;paul@d0tnetworkaholic.com&gt;</HardToEncodeString>
  <EasyToEncodeString><![CDATA["Paul
Lockwood" <paul@d0tnetworkaholic.com>]]></EasyToEncodeString>
</PaulsCDataExample>

This is why contracting rules - there are always fresh faces to learn from. Last
night it dawned on me that casting a working ArrayList to an array [via ToArray(typeof)] 
after parsing an input message/ config file is better than my
usual ’smart’ approach of creating a strongly typed collection (assuming you are only
reading the data). A Thoughtmill guy educated me there – a few months back the use
of Factories really clicked thanks to an Innovative Architects employee. Now should
I feel stupid or educated?

Roughly 24 hours after arriving at Atlanta airport Saturday morning Richard Rubin
and I arrived ready to begin at our client site tomorrow. The view from my hotel window
is rather good and I though y’all might appreciate it:

We are in Zell am See in Austria, speaking mostly German so far with the locals. Luckily
Richard’s Deutsche is far better than mine otherwise we’d still be in a random Bahnhof
between Munich and here. It is 8pm local time and other than two shorts naps I have
not slept for 32 hours so am about to crash hard. Our client’s English skills are
superb so I am looking forward to an easier day in the office tomorrow – yes we are
working the 4th of July while everyone else is celebrating kicking some English butt.