More .NET fun

[andrewducker]

I've had a stressfull 24 hours. I hate it when things don't work. I hate it even more when things don't work and don't give you enough information to even start looking for your problem...

Erin had asked me to find her a baclup program and, following 3 hours of searching, I decided that there wasn't a simple program that would do the copying on a daily basis. so I'd write my own. How hard could it be?

I got a simple program up and running yesterday which copied a folder from one place to another. That was actually fairly easy. I then decided I needed to store a list of which folders needed to be backed up. Now, I could play around with databases, but frankly that would mean digging out Access and finding out how to do Data Access in .NET, more trouble than I could be bothered with at that moment. Instead, I figured I'd just store the data in XML. XML's dead easy, after all. Any idiot can do it.

So I broke out the .NET book I have, discovered I was going to have to get myself involved in schemas (which define what a valid XML file can look like) and threw myself into it. And bounced off. With a fucking usless error message.

24 hours later, and much swearing and stress later, I discover that the problem is that alhough my XSD had a perfectly reasonable heirarchical structure, and validated just fine, it didn't contain an actual 'element'. I assumed that the top of the heirarchy would get automatically recognised as the root, but no. Apparently I needed an actual element to sit at the top. Not that the error message told me anything that useful. Noooooo.

I haven't got anywhere near the actual programming bit, either. I'm still futzing around in the IDE. I hesitate to think what the actual programming will be like...

Comments

[allorin.livejournal.com]

Meh.

[darkoshi]

well, if you have any specific xml problems, and can't figure them out, try me. i've been working with xml and xsl, as well as javascript and visual basic, at my work for the past few years.

so much so, that in the bookmark manager program i'm writing (similar to your situation, i searched on the net and didn't find any existing ones that met my requirement, so decided to do it myself - how hard could it be, right? heh), i naturally decided to create my ini file in xml format. even though my version of c++ at home doesn't have built-in xml support. i was wondering if i could just copy some files to my machine for that, or if installing msxml would give me access to those classes and functions... not that i really need it, since parsing a simple xml file like mine isn't hard.

[andrewducker]

Well, msxml allows you to read/write XML without a problem, even without an accompanying XSL file. The only reason I wanted an XSL file was because it seemed necessary if I was going to convert an XML object into an ADO object.

Cheers tho.

[kpollock.livejournal.com]

:-)

I have done some XSD stuff lately, but just a training course. Surely there you have access to documentation/books/help/examples on what constitutes a valid XSD?

I think you were rushing ;-)

[andrewducker]

Surely there

On my computer at home?

Not really. There's not a great number of "introduction to XSD" site on the net. I didn't find any good ones. Much less ones that told me how VS.NET used it. And my XSD was happily validating as correct both at the Microsoft and W3C sites - neither of which apparently check that you have a root element.