Here's a great article on adding custom functions for use in XPath expressions via the .NET XSLT framework classes. I was aware of passing custom obejects via extension objects, but I had no clue this functionality existed. The author does a good job demonstrating the extensibility of the XsltContext class for all sorts of purposes. Great stuff!

Update: Thanks to Jason Diamond for pointing out that I forgot to actually link to the article itself. Duh! :)

Yet another useful article from the MSDN Web Services center. The DIME specification is one that I wish was better established about two years ago when we (meaning my company) revamed our upload protocols. Come to think of it, even SOAP wasn't established enough. So we've hand rolled our own XML message format and in between there's a straight HTTP 1.1 chunked upload. The XML messages are custom schema and are used to initiate, resume, finalize and terminate uploads. Next version will be definitely be SOAP+DIME... can't wait!

New article posted under the .NET center of MSDN. If you haven't already guessed from the title, this one's about using the System.DirectoryServices namespace to search Active Directory. I see a lot of requests on how to do this on the mailing lists, so this will be a good article to point to for future requests.

Visual XSLT TryOut. I've been hearing about ActiveState's Visual XSLT tool quite a bit, and I was quite intrigued by it, but never found the time to give it a through test. This weekend finally the opportunity presented itself, so I downloaded the trial version and gave it a go.

...

Although I did run into a few gotchas, I did get a feel for the power of the tool (it even works with includes and all). Most definitely, this is a tool I'd love to have on my arsenal, so I guess it's savings time so that I can afford it in a few months... not very soon, though :( [Commonality]

I agree. I tried it out back when it was originally released and was quite impressed with it's capabilities as well. I wasn't doing all that much work with XSLT at the time, so I didn't really have the need to buy it. However, we're migrating our systems over to .NET and XSLT should play a bigger role. If so, I'll definitely recommend purchasing a copy for my company.

Ok, I don't know why it's working all of a sudden, but it is. For the past few days I haven't been able to post anything because Radio complained about not being able to read one of my data files due to an "incompatible version" or something like that. I have no clue why it started, but Radio hadn't been shutting down cleanly for about a week so I figure that had something to do with it. Its bound to happen again, so I'm starting to backup all my posts to XML in case I need to bail out of Radio and start using other blogging software. It seems like a lot of people are doing that these days...