A while back I began working on a project where I had to develop an XCA service. For those of you who don.t know what XCA is, see this: Cross-Community Access (XCA). XCA is a supplement of the XDS.b standard, which is Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (the .b. as opposed to .a. for the older version). Well, I find that there is plenty of specifications on XCA and XDS.b in PDF form, but they seem to focus on the format of data being sent over the wire, not really how to implement the service that communicates that format of data.

Initially, someone told me that I could just generate code out of the XSD and WSDL. This sounded great in theory and I had done that for working with CDA documents, but in this case when I tried to use XSD.exe to generate objects for the RIM.xsd schema it gave me a number of errors that elements were missing, so I gave up on that after reading articles on the internet where other people were having similar problems. One statement indicated .IHE is working on creating an XSD that is compatible with Microsoft.s XSD.exe tool, and will be out shortly.. Unfortunately, that post was made quite a while ago and I couldn.t find anything about a newer version from IHE.

So, instead I looked into using Microsoft.s implementation of XDS as an example to implement just my own little pieces. Their interfaces used a very odd approach of accepting (and responding with) raw System.ServiceModel.Channels.Message objects. In this case, I parsed and created raw XML and converted that raw XML into the Message object.

My most recent work has put me in a position to learn a great deal more about the health care IT industry. It has been quite an interesting learning curve over the past few months. Looking back, I.ve worked on hospital scheduling systems for an extensive period of time, then coincidentally lead the development of a claims administration system and now I.m learning about another corner of the industry (clinical documentation).

CDA is short for Clinical Document Architecture, which is a standard based on a standard called the HL7 RIM . reference information model. CDA, essentially, defines the XML-based structure in which a doctor can report information on procedures, allergies, diagnosis (etc) for a patient.

The full CDA specification can be found here.

A couple days back I installed Outlook 2010 Beta because I read an article about it that described a couple features that I could really use. So far, I must say, I am really impressed with the product. Although the interface hasn.t been changed that much, the changes that they did make to it sure do look nice.

So, here.s the doozy feature: Support for multiple exchange accounts in a single profile. This is a huge deal for me. I have several exchange accounts that I have to keep up with and the current version of outlook (2007) just doesn.t make that very easy.

Earlier I was thinking about all the different tools I use and how neat they are and I thought I would share the (vast?) list of tools with everyone and individual thoughts on them.

Productivity

- Microsoft Office 2007

- Outlook: The best email tool, ever. I use outlook in conjunction with http://www.myhosting.com (for exchange server email @ $10/mo) and a couple other IMAP email addresses. I synch my phone up with my calendar, tasks, contacts and email and am able to track all of my day-to-day stuff in one single place. I even have pictures associated with each contact (where possible) so that my Windows Mobile 6.1 phone displays their picture when they call.

- Word

- Excel: The ability to perform in-line calculations on spreadsheets is wonderful. I love many of google.s apps, but they try to put too many of them in the browser. The browser still lacks a lot of functionality. The browser should display content, not provide a full user interface to a complex application like excel.

- Access

A while back I ran into some issues with my system getting BSOD'd... The dell online chat representative (after remote assisting me) suggested that I re-install windows. After I did that I could no longer properly use my bluetooth headset devices.

Today, I spent about 30 minutes with another dell online chat representative trying to fix this issue (watching them remote assist my computer)... In the end, they told me they could not figure it out and could only suggest that speak with an On-Call representative (which costs money, of course). They told me that everything was fine with my system and that the problem must be with my bluetooth headset, which was not supported by them because it was not Dell.

Any developer that has programmed PHP can recognize that PHP was intended for Linux distributions and web servers. However, coming from a windows background I generally fancy windows web servers (not Linux). Don.t get me wrong, I am very familiar with Linux and at one point ran my own Linux servers and X-Windows desktops. However, I do believe that Microsoft is making good headway with web servers (II7), web services (WCF) and web applications (handy APIs such as Silverlight and WPF). Every one of these products have impressed me greatly.

Now, I am faced with a decision to make. Use PHP or use C#? Hands down I prefer C#. However, this project I am going to be working on is going to involved with a person that prefers PHP. This got me thinking. Why not use both? If I am going to be handling the back-end side of the web application and the other person is going to be handling the front-end, there doesn.t seem to me to be any reason why we shouldn.t use both! Now I need a proof of concept. I need to be able to feel confident that if I offer this as a suggestion (front-end done in PHP which calls the back-end WCF web services done in C#) then I need to be able to show that it works well (efficiently, cleanly, etc).

So my home server has been running now for almost a week (sort of). On Saturday the power went out in my basement and all my machines were shut off. When I flipped the breaker everything started coming back up and online, except for my new server. I talked to technical support via their email and eventually via phone and all was useless. However, eventually I WAS able to get it back online.

The problem was that the machine SEEMED as though it were booting like normal, but it would never finalize and connect to the network (allowing me to connect to it with WHS Connector). The blue power light would come on, the blue hard drive status lights would flicker for a while, and then the hard drive status light would stop and the .i. status indicator would repeatedly flash (and never stop). The hard drive lights that indicate WHS has loaded the drives into the WHS pool would never come and the network lights would never come on either.

Today I saw about a dozen lines of code in a project that I was working on simply dedicated to determining whether or not there are duplicates within a stringlist (List). This made me start to question whether or not there was a better way of doing this, to which the little light bulb in my head went off and directed me towards LINQ. A quick search on the web for "Finding duplicates with LINQ" landed me at this chunk of code: