Geeks in the West Country

Entries from June 2009

Alt.NET Bristol Beers #1 – Tuesday 21st July 2009

June 29, 2009 · 1 Comment

What: Alt.NET Beers!

When: Tuesday 21st July 2009

Where: Upstairs at The Portcullis, Clifton, Bristol, BS8 4LE

If spending an evening drinking beer and talking Alt.NET is your thing, then come along to the inaugural Alt.NET Bristol beers at the excellent Portcullis tavern in Clifton! Taking inspiration from the Alt.NET London beers, the format will be a mini openconference style session where everybody will get an opportunity to suggest and vote for the topic to be discussed.

If you’ve never attended a session like this before they are a lot of fun and a great way to share knowledge and experience!

The plan for the evening is:

18:00  – 18:45: Socialising and proposal of topics for discussion. Topics can be proposed by placing post-it notes on a topic wall. Before voting we will cluster similar topics together where it appears to make sense.

18:45 – 19:00: Vote for the topic of the day through a show of hands in two rounds.

19:00 – 20: 00 : 60-minute discussion around of the topic of the day. At the end of the discussion we will ask participants to fill in a wiki stating what they hoped to get out of the discussion and what they actually got out.

20:00 – late: Socialising, beers and debate!

The Portcullis has a great selection of beer and cheap food for those of us that require feeding. All of us at Bluewire look forward to seeing you there!

Categories: Alt.NET · Events
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Got an invalid XDocument but can’t work out why?

June 15, 2009 · Leave a Comment

This could be the reason…

I uncovered what I suspect may be a .NET Framework bug the other day, when I attempted to validate an XDocument against an XML schema which contained abstract datatypes.  It seems that XDocument.Validate() is unable to resolve derived types properly – it claimed that the concrete type of an XML element was not valid according to its abstract type in the schema.

Only after a lot of checking and self-reassurance that my XDocument really should be valid, and after dragging two colleagues through the problem and having them agree that it should be working too, did I begin to suspect something may be more fundamentally wrong.

I found that Visual Studio’s inbuilt XML document validation did think the document was valid. I then found that if the XDocument were saved out to a string, and validated using another method, there was no validation error.

I explain the problem in depth here. There are some code snippets and a sample Visual Studio project of a simple test case which sandboxes the problem effectively.

Categories: Microsoft
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