Tools
The wsdl.exe tool with Visual Studio can be used to manually generate a code file to use with a project. If you use the nillable or minOccurs attributes in the XSD though, the wsdl.exe tool generates a boolean 'Specified' field that must be set to true in order to transmit the data through the web service. For example: WSDL File (myfile.wsdl)<xs:element name="duedate" type="xs:dateTime" nillable="1" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" />
Generated CS File (wsdl.exe myfile.wsdl)// ...
private System.Nullable<System.DateTime> duedateField;
private bool duedateFieldSpecified;
// ...
/// <remarks/>
[System.Xml.Serialization.XmlElementAttribute(IsNullable=true)]
public System.Nullable<System.DateTime> duedate {
get {
return this.duedateField;
}
...
Lately I've been setting up a lot of virtual machines. It is time-consuming and frustrating but the end results are extremely useful. I discovered that using Windows 2003 R2 consumes a lot of hard disk space. I started with an 8 Gb virtual hard drive and before I knew it I ran out of space. Of course, depending on the VM I needed Microsoft Office, or Visual Studio, or SharePoint, or SQL Server, or BizTalk, or all of the above. I developed my base virtual machine first and then sysprep-ped it and then started installing all of the requisite software....
I had to brush up on my command-line parameters for cl, link, lib, and dumpbin today. It had been a little while since I had done this so I had to refresh my memory. The project dealt with a DLL generated by Delphi (the original source language was closest to Pascal/Delphi so I wrote a utility to convert Pascal rather than doing a massive conversion) and also generated C headers files and C unit test files at the same time. A while back they wanted a new DLL for a different project that used different functions from the original source....
I just needed to copy the output of the DOS command dir to another file. The usual mechanism is to send the output to a file, open the file, then copy the contents to the actual destination file. I was sure there must be an utility that would copy output in the command line to the clipboard and indeed I found such an utility. Kudos to Steve Kemp and his clipboard utility. I was able to do what I needed very easily:C:\>dir /s /b *.txt | clipboard -
Then just paste into Notepad++ or other application!