Friday, April 06, 2007

More XMHell

After only 8 hours or so, I managed to get some sort of grip on this XML stuff. Then I went to the pub and fortunately the Fat Bloke wasn't there.

There appear to be the usual caveats with Microsofts cunning plan for world domination which invovle making any sane person loose the will to live after trying to wade through what version of what actually works with what.

The good news is that it appears to be reasonably straightforward to write a CSV file without knowing the xml element names.

The bad news is that information on this really basic requirement is quite hard to come by.

The Reluctant Developer never ceases to be amazed (depressed) that he always appears to be the first person in the world to ever want to do a particular, seemingly basic, task.

Just lucky I gueess

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yeah, XML is one of those things that Microsoft pushed to (1) increase the complexity of files, so (2) you'd have to depend on libraries that are almost, but not quite compatible, so (3) developers are stuck on Microsoft platforms.

For instance, the WS_* stuff is supposedly a standard and supposedly interoperable... Until you actually try it.

I've started developing in the Microsoft world lately. I really like ASP.NET, but it astonishes me how bad the documentation is and how hard it is to find answers to common programming problems online.