Hello. I am Paul Kinlan.

I'm building a hierarchical tag directory for Topicala and need your help populating it. You can add tags via the web interface or by using the API: http://www.topicala.com/api/add/[TagName] to add a new tag and http://www.topicala.com/api/add/[ParentTag]/[ChildTag] to create parent/child relationships. Your contributions will eventually allow users to filter search results more effectively.

I'm experimenting with AdWords to drive traffic to both this site and Topicala.com. So far, I'm getting about 60 extra visitors per day to each site. I've tweaked my campaigns, disabling ads in Google's search results due to high costs. While I achieved a high volume of ad impressions (600,000) for kinlan.co.uk recently, the click-through rate remains low, and I need better insight into keyword performance and ad placement. I'd love to hear any marketing suggestions. If you arrived here through an AdSense ad, please share your feedback and the referring website. I'm considering using ads to promote specific blog posts for increased visibility.

This post agrees with Kirk Allen Evans's argument that .NET 3.0 should be named something closer to 2.5 due to its reliance on the 2.0 framework and compilers. The additive nature of the release doesn't warrant a full version number increment.

Microsoft has renamed WinFX to .NET Framework 3.0. This new version will include the existing .NET Framework 2.0 components (ASP.NET, WinForms, ADO.NET, additional base class libraries, and the CLR) along with new technologies like WPF, WCF, WF, and WCS. However, there's no mention of C# 3.0 being included, and the author finds this renaming confusing and unnecessary.

This post responds to Mike Champion's comment on my previous XLinq blog post. I clarify the XML file used (Wikipedia XML Abstract) and explain why I chose an XMLReader for its speed, especially when combined with custom data structures for a cyclic graph representation. XLinq's syntax and lambda expressions felt less intuitive for my task of converting XML into SQL statements. The project involves relating "title" elements with "sublink" entities, resulting in a complex graph structure not easily handled by XLinq without excessive data duplication and memory consumption. While XStreamingElement offers some improvement by avoiding redundant data scans, I desire deferred data loading for processing only necessary slices of the XML. This approach could handle selects, wheres, and counts efficiently in a single pass, and even joins with clever indexing. Defining a schema during XML iteration seems redundant when XLinq expressions already specify data requirements. Pre-loading entire XML documents into memory feels inefficient when only a small portion is used. I propose deferring data loading until needed, despite potential issues with repeated XDocument inspections. Ideally, XLinq should scale without forcing users to revert to less efficient methods due to data size limitations. I inquire about potential hard limits and scaling formulas related to XML document size in XLinq.

Blogger has quietly rolled out RSS 2.0 support, which I discovered via reports and confirmed by IE7. Time to clean up my feeds!

I've added hCard, a microformat, to my blog. It makes my contact info machine-readable while still being visible to readers. It's basically an XHTML version of the vCard standard. I'm not totally sure I implemented it perfectly with the DIVs and spans, but check out the hCard creator tool if you're interested.

I'm highlighting a comment from Mike Champion, XLinq's program manager at Microsoft, addressing the issue of querying large XML files with XLinq. He discusses their current investigation into this problem and seeks feedback on how large XML documents are typically structured. Specifically, he asks about the structure of my 900MB XML file to better understand user needs and design appropriate solutions within XLinq. He mentions exploring options like a LINQ-queryable XmlReader or a lazy evaluation approach similar to XStreamingElement, while aiming for simplicity and avoiding dependencies on schemas or XPath. He's open to further discussion via his blog's contact form.

I've reinstalled the latest WPF and WCF beta versions and I'm planning to write some blog posts about it very soon. I'm ready to dive back into WPF and share new insights.

I'm incredibly frustrated with Blogger's lack of updates, inconsistent publishing, and inflexibility. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone looking for a reliable blogging platform.