I have recently been writing an assembly which facilitates automatic deployment of K2.Net 2003 workflows. The assembly reads in a configuration file and deploys the workflows as specified in the configuration file. Also, rather than writing any custom code to validate the XML, I decided to use an XML Schema Definition, mainly because it saves me time and typing, but also because it’s good practice.

Anyhow, in order to use the XSD, I had to give my schema a namespace, and because I didn’t want to have to add a whole bunch of prefixes to my configuration file, I decided to use the default namespace:

<configuration xmlns=”http://temuri.org/configuration.xsd”></configuration>

This broke all my xpath queries because the .NET XPath query code does not seem to handle the default namespace. What I ended up doing to fix it was using an XmlNamespaceManager to create a fake namespace with the same URI as the default namespace, and then change all of my XPath queries to use the prefix for that fake namespace. Something like:

XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
doc.Load(”configuration.xml”);
// To get the URI for the default namespace
string xmlns = doc.DocumentElement.GetAttribute(”xmlns”);
XmlNamespaceManager namespaceManager = new XmlNamespaceManager();

namespaceManager.AddNamespace( “a”, xmlns );

// Now query with XPath
XmlNodeList nodes = doc.SelectNodes(”/a:configuration/a:solution”);

With a configuration file which looks something like:

The way I see it, it involves less typing than actually using a prefix. That said, given that it feels like a lazy way out, it probably isn’t the best practice because there is now a difference between my queries and my xml.

I was just thinking how easy it is to tag all of your code with the essential metadata it needs:

• What does it do?
• What are the inputs?
• What are the outputs?

Now we can, of course, put in plenty more metadata, such as general remarks, what exceptions are thrown, examples of how to use your code etc. What astonishes me is how much code I see which doesn’t even have the essentials listed above. If you’re using Visual Studio you really have no excuse all it takes is literally three /’s and visual studio will put in the skeleton for you.

You will all comment your code religiously from now on, and then you will use Sandcastle to generate a compiled help file from it.