The .NET XML serialization support is pretty cool — I’ve used it for a few projects now. It provides an easy way to convert objects with properties to and from XML. The implementation dynamically generates a serialization assembly to do this at runtime, so a recommended strategy for improving runtime performance is to generate your serialization assemblies in advance using the XML Serializer Generator Tool (Sgen.exe).

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I ran into a kind of baffling problem. I’ve got some .NET code that is also accessible to Java via JNI. There are unit tests for the .NET code that all pass. To test the Java to .NET connection, I wrote a few JUnit tests which worked fine when run from the IDE, but failed when run from Ant. The failure was ultimately caused by an ArgumentException when creating an XmlSerializer.

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I always have a hard time keeping straight all the possible ways of getting an assembly’s name and what form the various methods return. Here’s a little program and its output for a reference.

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Getting a COM IStream instance on a normal file seems like something that should be trivial to do, but it always seems to take some hunting to remember how it is actually done. Read the rest of this entry »

After years of building this site with my own custom software, I’ve decided to switch to WordPress.

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This is just a quick addition to the previous posting, confirming the alleged use of m_ by Microsoft in their own code. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the greatest questions facing theologists is this: What should be the naming convention for private fields? The most controversial aspect is the use of m_ as a prefix. Read the rest of this entry »

The documentation around Office 2007 ribbon customization is still a bit sparse. I’ve been trying to add a new entry under the Save As menu in the Office Menu, and after a fair amount of trial and error, I found a way to do that. Read the rest of this entry »