The question is simple: How can a document the content of a certain directory tree and all its content. There are many possibilities in a Unix environment (perl, bash,etc.) , but in the Microsoft Windows world it is more difficult to get such informations using command line scripts.

I wrote a simple vbscript that can do the job in at least three different ways:

• It generates an xml structure which reflects all the dirctory informations
• It generates an Excel Spreadsheet, which can be used for other processes
• It generates a printout

All three possibilities are useful in different situations.
But what is the script really doing ?

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This is great! WIX, the first open source product developed by Microsoft is definitly the most flexible choice if you want to develop msi based installations under Windows.

What makes WIX so great?
A random list of arguments:

1. It is a full implementation of all functions a msi installation may have.
2. WIX based install scripts are given in XML format. This helps to automate, to document and to extend the installation in a very transparent way.
3. WIX provides some very helpful extensions of the msi standard, such as database creation, user management and other tasks.
4. There a lot of sample scripts
5. WIX has been used in some very relevant projects and by some statemenents of Rob Menschig WIX is used very often in very relevant production of the Microsoft Cooperation
6. Some very elegant methods for conditional compiling and conditional deployment.

Currently I am involved inthe development of a complex set of client and server installation packages for windows based software systems. I’ll present some more technical infos, ecspecially on those informations for which google and the sourceforge groups gave me no or unsufficient answers (eg. on shortcuts, unc paths, conditions, registry…).

Again, the Windows Installer XML is phantastic (perhaps I am biased by my preference of textual, script based, non WYSIWYG development)

Thanks to Rob Menschig and the team at Microsoft for the nice job they have done.

The W3 consortium, the center of web standards, begins to evaluate the AJAX hype, hmmm…
The main activities are embedded into the WEB API activity, where the XMLHttpRequest Object is the starting point of research. In fact you could follow the acual status of the draft at http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/2006/webapi/XMLHttpRequest/

This document is a simple restatement of the common properties of all the implementations
of this principal javascript object for AJAX. Perhaps not new but worth to read, because at the end (which is typically defined by the publication of a W3 recommendation) the XMLHttpRequest is a W3 Standard, Such standards always had and have string influence on further developments.

Another small activity it the aval project, a receipt to embed XML and CSS validation services into the validated page itself. Perhaps a nice POC (proof of concept) for the guys at W3C itself…

A nice introduction of the W3C point of view (?!?) is the talk Web of applications presented by Dave Raggett
at Google, Mountain View, 1st February 2006. definitly worth to read (and it is nicely compiled using the slidy slide generator tool). Check it out !

Oh, forgot to mention another AJAX at w3.org. It is the Tabulator, a semantic web browser, loading and browsing RDF informations. It was built by Tim Berner Lee, the inventor of HTML and web browser, one of the most influental person in the web itself This fact alone makes it worth to look at this prototype…. Wonder if somebody is going to extend it.

Tim Berner Lee also wrote a short post on Tabluator which explains the context.