Afanaat.nl | Sander Schutten

Aaah! I’ve read some very good news today. For some time now, I’m looking into developing plug-ins for XP Media Center, but I dislike the way it works. It looks like with Vista all my dreams will come true!

For XP one could develop plug-ins in the form of simple HTML pages, so it would always look as if the plug-in was bolted onto the side. Vista, in return, makes use of the eXtensible Markup Language defined with Windows Presentation Foundation. This enables the developer to create plug-ins that would seamlessly integrate with the product, using all of the same cool graphic effects!

Read more on Vista Media Center here.

Almost every BizTalk artifact is beautifully documentable, especially using the BizTalk Documenter. One thing that’s always hard to document are the maps. Finally someone came up with a solution and that someone is Steve Hart.

The HTML Generator Stylesheet for BizTalk 2004 Maps is an XSLT which transforms the data of a map into viewable HTML. Although the approach is a good one, I’m not really sure about the added value. I don’t think the rendered HTML pages are very readable as there’s a lot of textual information on them. I think it’ll always be difficult to document a map, but maybe if it is presented in a more graphical and readable way it’s more useful. I’ll just wait for the next version.