Jelle Druyts

Hmmm, not a lot of posts recently. Have I learnt nothing at all then the last couple of days? Sure I have!

The coolest thing I've done this week (at work anyway ) is writing a sort of ASP.NET databinder for xml documents. Shortly put, it's a component that binds a property of a control to a node within an xml document using an xpath query. For example, it can bind a textbox txtCustomerEmail to the xml node "/customer/info/contact/@email" - which means it will fill the textbox with the proper attribute value from the attached xml document, and after a submit it can update the xml document with the modified email address the user entered in the textbox.

As an extra treat, if the node specified by the xpath query doesn't exist yet, an attempt will be made to create it - along with any underlying nodes that don't exist yet. So if you try to set the email address to 'billg@microsoft.com' (yes, he's a customer of ours ) but the xml only contains for example, it will create the info and contact nodes, and the email attribute within it to result in the following xml: . Cool? I think so!

I have to admit that it's still fairly limited (it can only handle basic xpath queries to be able to create nodes), and it would be great to implement this as an extender provider but since those still don't work in ASP.NET, I guess that's out of the question.

I've also been quite busy on E = m c² again, watch this space for some cool updates real soon!