I had a lot of trouble with a XPath query yesterday and didn't find a lot on google, so I'll post the solution I found here.

<foo>

<bar xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">content goes here</bar>

</foo>

The problem I had was creating a query to get the content of the bar element, since it's not in the default namespace. The solution I found appears to me as a nasty hack, so any comments pointing to a better solution are welcome:

/foo/*[local-name() = 'bar' and namespace-uri() = 'http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml']

Ingo Ramer posted a number of his white papers targeted at application architects, designers and developers who are working with .NET and Web Services technologies. Currently there are 3 available but 4 more are coming soon. My personal favorite:

The Flowchart Lie
or: Why do we still use request/response to handle asynchronous business processes?

These come highly recommended since Imgo is one of the most knowledgeable in the field (and not yet swallowed by the big house).

Reading this post by Nikhil Kothari, it's clear the asp.net tema is doing their best to support recent w3c standards for accessibility and markup, which I believe is a good thing. The biggest improvement will be for people who use screenreaders and search engines, who regularly throw a fit when confronted with excessive javascript.

I finished a first version (v 0.9) of a blog aggregator for the root of this site. Some work still remains, the design sucks for one, http headers are ignored and the caching could be better, but I'm quite happy with the asynchronous webrequests.

The code needs some touching up, before I can post it here. I'll try to get it up later this week.

IFC and Bravo have been running a 10 minute behind-the-scenes of Kill Bill clip. In case you missed it or like me don't live in a country where they aired it, it's available online at The Movie Box. Now if only the movie would be released in the Netherlands at the same time as the rest of the world.

After going through the PDC schedule and see what sessions are in which time slots, I realized, I need to get my cloning business going full speed ahead. There are just to many cool sessions happening at once. Thankfully some sessions are repeated, but some aren't.

I hope Rory is willing to swap some notes.

I just noticed time slots have been added to the pdc sessions, so it's time I started planning the What, where and when.

As a broad, but very complete overview of a number of ws-* specs and how they interoperate with each other and other pieces of the webservice architecture (e.g. WSDL), this paper  shows were Microsoft and IBM are heading with webservices in the near and not so near future. Combined with the Transaction specifactions we have some very powerfull tools for building globe spanning applications.

Microsoft just released a MMC snap-in to manage IIS 6.0 form Windows XP, so finally, I'll be able to manage my webserver from my tablet pc. Unfortunately this doesn't install IIS 6.0 with it's workerprocess model on XP, but maybe someday.

An excellent article by Julien Cheyssial descripes how, by using Response.Flush(), you can send parts of the rendered content to the client. And thus for example render a progress bar.

Check out the demo and the article.