XSLT development– display XML

While working on a xslt project, got to know about this xslt file which lets you output the xml as is. This is excellent for debugging purposes to see what xml the xslt file gets to work on.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
      xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" >

<xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes" />

  <xsl:template match="/ | @* | node()">
    <xsl:copy>
      <xsl:apply-templates select="@* | node()"/>
    </xsl:copy>
  </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

Message Queue using cloud computing – Azure and Amazon

Recently I was involved in an assignment which involved using messagequeue. We ended up implementing both Amazon and Azure as Queue providers. With libraries available for both of them, its very easy to integrate both in application.

Amazon Web Services

Amazon provides SDK for many platforms such as Java, PHP, Python, Ruby and .Net. SDK makes it very easy to incorporate any cloud computing service in your application.

Three simple Steps to incorporate Amazon Queue in .Net apps:

1. Download the SDK
2. Reference AWSSDK.dll in your project
3. Write code (Found the SDK samples to be very helpful and easy to understand)

Windows Azure

Just like Amazon, Azure provides SDKs for Java and .Net. I liked Amazons approach that they give you the code samples with SDK. Azure does give you some code samples but they don’t include samples for Queue and not for every services which it provides. To get all the samples, you can get them from here (Make sure to download samples which are marked as Additional C# Samples)

Same with Azure, simple steps to incorporate

1. Download the SDK from here .
2. Reference  Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient.dll in your project
3. Write code

One thing I noticed is that Queue names has to be in a certain format else you’ll get an exception response. Naming conventions are found here.

Enjoy Cloud computing!

Extracting tags from xhtml content

There are two ways of doing it. One is the dirty way, using Mid function in VB.Net or IndexOf string method but the more appropriate way would be to use regular expressions.

Following code will get you title using regular expression

Regex regex = new Regex("<title>(?<title>.*?)</title>", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
Match titleMatch = regex.Match(html);
string title = titleMatch.Groups["title"].Value;

Following code will get you meta tag My_Meta

Regex regex = new Regex("<META +NAME=\"(?<name>My_Meta*?)\" +CONTENT=\"(?<content>.*?)\" */?>", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);

Match metaMatch = regex.Match(html);

title = metaMatch.Groups["content"].Value;

jQuery Plugins

• Growl: Popup messages like messenger style in a browser
• Growl use in SharePoint: using Growl to show open tasks in SharePoint. Calling webservices from client side using jQuery.