Release: Javascript XML serialization library I’m working on a project that will access MS CRM directly via Javascript. Microsoft uses SOAP web services as their API protocol, and arguments have to be in a very particular XML format. I couldn’t find anything off-the-shelf that would allow complex SOAP calls, so I started hacking. Part of the solution turned into a…

Io on .NET No, I didn’t mis-title this post. I’m not talking about I/O , I’m talking about Io . Io is a dynamic programming language whose message-oriented syntax shares some similarity with Smalltalk and whose prototypal object system is similar to that of Javascript. I’m thinking a lot about metaprogramming these days, trying to encode functionality as data as…

Limitations of C# dynamic I’ve been using the new dynamic keyword along with anonymous types recently, but I think that these features kind of miss the mark. Anonymous types aren’t dynamic at all — they just define the type implicitly — you can’t add new items at runtime. However you can use the DLR’s ExpandoObject if you want to be…

Refactoring to domain-specific languages Today I was adding new functionality to a library of Microsoft CRM functions that I’ve been building up to make performing queries more manageable, when I realized that I was duplicating a lot of code between different query types. For example, we might want to construct a query that has a simple filter on it that…

Stupid .NET serialization tricks I’ve been meaning to write up a few things about .NET serialization that I’ve come across recently. I have a basic set of maneuvers for getting the XML output to look like you need it to in the case that you are trying to use some .NET data structures as the basis for writing out some…

Code reading: Google Chrome Speed Dial I’m thinking about starting a new series of posts where I write a few interesting details about some source code that I’ve read recently. From time to time I come across something unexpected or noteworthy, and in any case I put it in my notes — so why not post it up here? On…

Declarative dynamic ASP.NET forms A few days ago, I wrote a post dealing with literal data structures in .NET with a vague allusion to using them to do some declarative configuration duties. Well, to follow up, I’m going to show you a little bit about what I’m thinking. I’ve been really spoiled the last year or so doing Javascript, and…

IE6/compatibility view testing On a recent client project, I was working on a few simple contact info forms for donations and dues renewals. I put together some nice, clean css layouts for the form fields and proceeded to the meat of the project, which was MS CRM integration. Things were going well until it came time to do a client…

C# object literal notation I have a project coming up where I’d like to be able to write some declarative configuration in an object literal notation similar to JSON. The project is going to be written in C#, so I could embed a Javascript implementation like IronJS and just use JSON, or I could try using IronPython or some other…

Dynamic objects in C# Microsoft’s efforts toward making its .NET languages more dynamic get plenty of hype, so when I dug into using dynamic (aka expando) objects hoping to solve a few simple problems where I wanted to perform data binding on data that would only be known at runtime, I was optimistic that the new features would be just…