Today’s .NET Ramblings
ODF Command Line Translator
The OpenXML/ODF Translator Add-ins for Office project includes ODF Translator Command Line Tools, written for .NET 2.0. This introduces the possibility of acceptable batch translation of Microsoft Word Files into the Open Document Format.
Regex Performance Problem
I was so blown away by the dramatic speed improvements of my Word Add-In, “CleanXHTML 1.2 for Microsoft Office Word 2003 (.NET 2.0).” At first my suspicions led me assume that the XSL “engine” in .NET 2.0 was just that much faster than the old on in 1.x. But eventually the information in this MSDN forums post, “Re: regex performance problem,” introduced me to the dangers of using regular expressions unwisely—specifically my use of wildcards was crazy: “One of the pitfalls with regular expression is that you can write expressions which don’t perform very well. In particular, you can end up with expressions whose search time grows exponentially with the length of the search string.”
Using PowerShell for Unit Testing
Eventually someone on this planet will release a unit testing framework based on PowerShell. This article, “Test Run: Lightweight Testing with Windows PowerShell—MSDN Magazine, May 2007,” leads the way…
PowerShell for Deployment
“Deployment made simple using PowerShell” by Omar Al Zabir also suggests that PowerShell is a viable alternative to msbuild and nant.
WCF Marketing Problems
In “WCF development tools and practices need improvement” Jack Vaughan writes, “Count Richard Hale Shaw among the vocal members of the group that hold this position. Shaw, CEO of the Richard Hale Shaw Group recently shared his thoughts on WCF with members of the Beantown .NET User Group in Boston. He said poor product naming, along with poor tooling and complex configuring, have not helped WCF in the marketplace. Why isn’t WCF accepted more readily?”
As of now WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) is great (to me) for one increasingly rare situation: Windows applications needing to talk to another Windows application, from one application domain to another, without much fuss. Most of my “communication foundation” time over the last decade has been spent getting data out of Windows into a read-only, forward-only XML format transported over HTTP.