All posts by : Arpan Desai

1 of 21 | Primus - About me: Well, my name is Arpan Desai and I'm a Program Manager with the SQL Server group at Microsoft.  I work on the System.Xml stack in the .NET Framework, focusing on XML querying. What you'll find on my blog: I'm going to mainly focus on 'XML Tips & Tricks', but I'll also dive a bit into other diversions such as HTPCs/HDTV/Pretty much anything technology related. ...

2 of 21 | Performance of System.Xml in the .NET Framework V2 - Vindication tastes so sweet: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/java/compare/xmlperf/default.aspx...

3 of 21 | XQuery in the .NET Framework - Revisited - As I was catching up on email this afternoon, I noticed that Stylus Studio had sent out an XQuery-related newsletter which contained an interesting campaign to save XQuery on Microsoft .NET 2.0. As I read through the email, a few issues and questions arose for me which I felt would be best addressed by one of my famously, non-frequent blog posts. Issue:  The basic premise of this petition is to convince Microsoft to ship XQuery as part of.NET Framework 2.0.We have been in feature freeze for the .NET Framework quite some time now.  Heck, we recently released Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2, which includes .NET Framework 2.0 Beta 2, and are well on our way to RTM.  Theres no throwing features like ......

4 of 21 | XQuery in the .NET Framework - Revisited - As I was catching up on email this afternoon, I noticed that Stylus Studio had sent out an XQuery-related newsletter which contained an interesting campaign to save XQuery on Microsoft .NET 2.0. As I read through the email, a few issues and questions arose for me which I felt would be best addressed by one of my famously, non-frequent blog posts. Issue:  The basic premise of this petition is to convince Microsoft to ship XQuery as part of.NET Framework 2.0.We have been in feature freeze for the .NET Framework quite some time now.  Heck, we recently released Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2, which includes .NET Framework 2.0 Beta 2, and are well on our way to RTM.  Theres no throwing features like ......

5 of 21 | Pobre Mark - The Grinch (the watch, not Mark) Apparently Mark`s ongoing saga with this "SmartWatch" is just that: ongoing.  I remember when he walked into my office earlier this year and showed me his nice, new, shiny watch and the fact that with the press of a button (or two), he could figure out when/where his next meeting was.  This single feature made me an instant fan.  Forget the news, the weather, my horoscope, and whatever useless pieces of information they think is interesting on a 1-inch display.  All I wanted to know was the time and location of my next meeting. Initally, I balked at the price of the watch in combination with subscription requirement.  Then Mark`s watch went out.  After the f......

6 of 21 | Pobre Mark - The Grinch (the watch, not Mark) Apparently Mark`s ongoing saga with this "SmartWatch" is just that: ongoing.  I remember when he walked into my office earlier this year and showed me his nice, new, shiny watch and the fact that with the press of a button (or two), he could figure out when/where his next meeting was.  This single feature made me an instant fan.  Forget the news, the weather, my horoscope, and whatever useless pieces of information they think is interesting on a 1-inch display.  All I wanted to know was the time and location of my next meeting. Initally, I balked at the price of the watch in combination with subscription requirement.  Then Mark`s watch went out.  After the f......

7 of 21 | Timeshifting not always a good thing - I love PVRs.  They let me timeshift television shows so that I can watch whenever I want.  One good thing about PVRs is that I KNOW what I`m watching isn`t stale.  I know that the ten episodes of "The Daily Show" on my Media Center aren`t all current, but heck, they`re still hilarious. Timeshifting on MSDN TV is a different story.  As Jeff noticed, MSDN decided to post an episode that mfussell taped earlier this year.  As with just about everything that Microsoft develops, there has been a significant amount of thinking and churn that`s happened since then....making portions of the episode completely incorrect.  Lesson learned:  Timeshifting on MSDN TV is not a good thing. Oleg picked up on......

8 of 21 | Timeshifting not always a good thing - I love PVRs.  They let me timeshift television shows so that I can watch whenever I want.  One good thing about PVRs is that I KNOW what I`m watching isn`t stale.  I know that the ten episodes of "The Daily Show" on my Media Center aren`t all current, but heck, they`re still hilarious. Timeshifting on MSDN TV is a different story.  As Jeff noticed, MSDN decided to post an episode that mfussell taped earlier this year.  As with just about everything that Microsoft develops, there has been a significant amount of thinking and churn that`s happened since then....making portions of the episode completely incorrect.  Lesson learned:  Timeshifting on MSDN TV is not a good thing. Oleg picked up on......

9 of 21 | XPathNavigator and the DataSet - An article I recently wrote about an XPathNavigator over DataSets is currently running on MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/default.aspxpull=/library/en-us/dnxmlnet/html/datasetnav.asp).  Might be an interesting read if you ever perform XPath queries or XSLT transformations on top of DataSets....

10 of 21 | XPathNavigator and the DataSet - An article I recently wrote about an XPathNavigator over DataSets is currently running on MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnxmlnet/html/datasetnav.asp).  Might be an interesting read if you ever perform XPath queries or XSLT transformations on top of DataSets....

11 of 21 | Obligatory cheesy conference post - It seems that most members of the the blogging community succumb to posting a “Yesterday at the -Insert Name- Conference...”, so who am I to rock the boat. Yesterday at TechEd 2004, Mark gave his talk on “XML Today and Tommorrow”...basically a rundown on how people use our bits in the current version of the .NET Framework and some of the improvements we`re making in Whidbey.  Unfortunately I wasn`t able to make it because I was meeting with some customers, but from feedback I got from talking with several customers afterwards, it went quite well.  Rumor is there was applause when he demoed some of the XQuery functionality we`re introducing.  That`s good for my XQuery talk on Friday. In the ......

12 of 21 | Obligatory cheesy conference post - It seems that most members of the the blogging community succumb to posting a “Yesterday at the -Insert Name- Conference...”, so who am I to rock the boat. Yesterday at TechEd 2004, Mark gave his talk on “XML Today and Tommorrow”...basically a rundown on how people use our bits in the current version of the .NET Framework and some of the improvements we`re making in Whidbey.  Unfortunately I wasn`t able to make it because I was meeting with some customers, but from feedback I got from talking with several customers afterwards, it went quite well.  Rumor is there was applause when he demoed some of the XQuery functionality we`re introducing.  That`s good for my XQuery talk on Friday. In the ......

13 of 21 | Promises, promises - So much for for blogging more regularly.  But if there was ever a reason to start up again, Mark`s recent post on XSLT 2.0 and Dare`s response are as good a reason as you can get.  As the XML Query (XPath, XSLT, XQuery, anything else) Program Manager for the .NET Framework, it`s time for me to chime in. First, we`re not abandoning XSLT 1.0.  Far from it, we`ve completely rewritten our XSLT implementation from scratch in Whidbey (XsltCommand) in order to solve the major performance issues we had with the current implementation.  Our original intention was to meet MSXML 4.0`s incredible performance.  I believe we`ll surpass this goal by the time we release. XSLT 1.0 will still be a (the) core......

14 of 21 | Promises, promises - So much for for blogging more regularly.  But if there was ever a reason to start up again, Mark`s recent post on XSLT 2.0 and Dare`s response are as good a reason as you can get.  As the XML Query (XPath, XSLT, XQuery, anything else) Program Manager for the .NET Framework, it`s time for me to chime in. First, we`re not abandoning XSLT 1.0.  Far from it, we`ve completely rewritten our XSLT implementation from scratch in Whidbey (XsltCommand) in order to solve the major performance issues we had with the current implementation.  Our original intention was to meet MSXML 4.0`s incredible performance.  I believe we`ll surpass this goal by the time we release. XSLT 1.0 will still be a (the?) cor......

15 of 21 | Tim Bray / RSS Bandit strikes again - Tim Bray, of XML co-creator fame, was just interviewed by News.Com. In the article, he gives a good overview of why XML was created and the possible solutions that were available at the time. Few other things of note: Positive things to say about Microsoft and XML. He likes Visual Studio .NET`s easy integration with web services. I appreciate the fact that he mentions he`s seen the Office 2003 XML schemas. There`s a lot of FUD out there regarding the openness of the XML with regard to Office 2003. For those of you non-believers, start believing. Apparently fee......

16 of 21 | PDC, XQuery, and mfussell - That special time of year has finally come: Microsoft is hosting PDC (Professional Developers Conference) at the end of October. For those of you not completely in the know, PDC is where we get to reveal all the cool technologies we`ve been working on. There are several sessions of particular interst this year this year: .NET Framework: Exploring What`s New in the Base Class Library for "Whidbey" The BCL guys have done a great job of adding a lot of needing functionality to the framework. .NET Framework: What`s New in System.Xml for "Whidbey" - mfussell My boss is......

17 of 21 | Tim Bray / RSS Bandit strikes again - Tim Bray, of XML co-creator fame, was just interviewed by News.Com. In the article, he gives a good overview of why XML was created and the possible solutions that were available at the time. Few other things of note: Positive things to say about Microsoft and XML. He likes Visual Studio .NET`s easy integration with web services. I appreciate the fact that he mentions he`s seen the Office 2003 XML schemas. There`s a lot of FUD out there regarding the openness of the XML with regard to Office 2003. For those of you non-believers, start believing. Apparently fee......

18 of 21 | PDC, XQuery, and mfussell - That special time of year has finally come: Microsoft is hosting PDC (Professional Developers Conference) at the end of October. For those of you not completely in the know, PDC is where we get to reveal all the cool technologies we`ve been working on. There are several sessions of particular interst this year this year: .NET Framework: Exploring What`s New in the Base Class Library for "Whidbey" The BCL guys have done a great job of adding a lot of needing functionality to the framework. .NET Framework: What`s New in System.Xml for "Whidbey" - mfussell My boss is......

19 of 21 | Picking Up Steam - Just got back from a relaxing week in beautiful southern california.  Mid-80s, not a cloud in sight...basically perfection.  Fry`s, (mom`s) food, friends, and most importantly, strong drinks. Anyway, back in the real world, we`re conducting usability tests on V2 of System.Xml this week.  So far the results haven`t been that surprising.  Our `suspect` areas are indeed causing confusion with the participants.  One item of solace for us is they were playing with (now outdated) Whidbey Alpha bits and we`ve already cleaned/fixed many of the problems they mentioned. Hopefully we`ll get some more good feedback fro......

20 of 21 | Picking Up Steam - Just got back from a relaxing week in beautiful southern california.  Mid-80s, not a cloud in sight...basically perfection.  Fry`s, (mom`s) food, friends, and most importantly, strong drinks. Anyway, back in the real world, we`re conducting usability tests on V2 of System.Xml this week.  So far the results haven`t been that surprising.  Our `suspect` areas are indeed causing confusion with the participants.  One item of solace for us is they were playing with (now outdated) Whidbey Alpha bits and we`ve already cleaned/fixed many of the problems they mentioned. Hopefully we`ll get some more good feedback fro......

21 of 21 | Primus - About me: Well, my name is Arpan Desai and I`m a Program Manager with the SQL Server group at Microsoft.  I work on the System.Xml stack in the .NET Framework, focusing on XML querying. What you`ll find on my blog: I`m going to mainly focus on `XML Tips & Tricks`, but I`ll also dive a bit into other diversions such as HTPCs/HDTV/Pretty much anything technology related. ...