WSDL and Deem's Dime Dogfood :)
I'm presenting on WSE (Web Services Enhancements) at the Visual Studio/Windows Server 2003 launch in Seattle on Thursday, and while going through an internal Rough Draft my CTO Chris Brooks, brought up the question, but where does WSDL define DIME.  My short answer was, "Hell if I know, it's out of band" and Chris said "that's not good enough."  So, a little poking around led us to Mike Deem's DIME WSDL Extension roughspec/RFC.  What's going on in this space?  There's a cacophony of WS-KitchenSink specs out there with all their glorious interrelationships, and WSDL a tricky touch point.  I know some folks have strong opinions about WSDL, but regardless, WSDL clearly, as XML is wont to do, can be twisted and turned to fit, but should it be? And until then should I just chalk DIME up as out-of-band literally and contractually?  Or do I eat Deem's Dogfood?
Updated Link to this post 4:26:46 PM  #    comment []  trackback []

Exporting tabular data to Excel from ASP.NET

There's a number of ways to "export" data to Excel from an ASP.NET site - some more elegant than others.

• Gross: You can use ASP.NET to generate a CSV file of Mime Type text/plain or text/csv and write it back to the browser.
• NOT Gross: You can use ASP.NET to generate an XML-SS (Excel XML Spreadsheet) document and write it back to the browser.
• Really Easy but not Really XMLy: You can take advantage of the ASP.NET DataGrid's ability to generate HTML tables quickly and return the page with a Mime Type of application/vnd.ms-excel.  Here's a great example on how to create these reports. 
• Easy but uses 3rd Party Control: Use ExcelWriter on the server side to create the Report.
• Disgusting: Automate Excel on the ServerSide.  Don't do this for Pete's Sake.

Updated Link to this post 3:33:23 PM  #    comment []  trackback []