XML Encoding on Windows

If your XML document uses the Windows character set, you must set the encoding of the XML document to "ISO-8859-1".  Otherwise, some XML processors (like Internet Explorer) will complain about an invalid character.  A particularly common case of non-ASCII characters in an otherwise normal file occurs when the text was generated in Microsoft Word and included quote characters that had been converted into "smart quotes".

Windows Script Components and DCOM

I created a sample Windows Script Component (WSC).  It also illustrates the use of DCOM.  I had a devil of a time configuring the

Windows XP server and client DCOM environments using the Component Services control panel.  It has always been hard --SP2 has made it even harder.  In the end I just turned off the firewalls (on both the client and server sides) and made the DCOM server run as the logged in user.  Obviously, those measures are only good for testing purposes.  If I'm feeling masochistic, I might try to figure out the right way to do it some day.  Right after I internalize the MS SharePoint security configuration...

MS SQL Server Bug

The PATINDEX function doesn't seem to handle brackets properly.  The statement:

select patindex('%[%', 'abc[]def')

returns '0' instead of '4'.

After some experimentation, I see that brackets are being interpreted according to the usual regexp syntax.  PATINDEX is not documented to support regular expressions, so this is unexpected.  As per regexps, the following statement works:

select patindex('%[[]%', 'abc[]def')

DAEMON Tools

DAEMON Tools is a handy program that allows CD ISO images to be mounted as devices.