In response to a question from a reader, Tim, this is a follow-up from an earlier article on SharePoint, SOAP and VBScript. This time, we'll look at how to do more complex calls to SharePoint web services in VBScript

Some web services in SharePoint require passing XML as parameters. Unfortunately, you can't pass an XML document, it has to be an XML node element, and this takes a bit of effort to construct in VBScript.

The example we'll use is making a call to GetListItems, which returns all items in a SharePoint library, optionally matching a query formatted using a special XML syntax.

I love the Internet.

Where else can you jump from a site written by the inventor of XML to a monumentally huge 5000 word rant on why Ruby on Rails sucks (and a glimpse of a whole world of geekery out there which I will never be part of) to a nifty new Ruby framework for writing light cross-platform apps, Shoes.

Yes, I know that sounds super geeky. But it's this happy accident of stumbling across something new and exciting which I love. Millions of times a day, people learn something new from someone they will never meet, who probably won't even know they visited their now-public journal.

In the days past when I worked for the IT support section of DSTO, this mystical program called "TARDIS" popped up from time to time.

They didn't tend to talk to the IT department (or at least not the part that I worked for), so it was always a bit amorphous and no-one seemed to know what it actually did.

Well, Graham Durant-Law has a number of informative PowerPoint presentations (particularly this one) and it explains the process in more detail.

I have a lot of respect for the work that Anecdote does, but I'm going to have to come down entirely on Dave Snowden's side on the ongoing debate between him and Shawn.

I was pleased to see that Dave picked up on my comment about McDonald's employees not being knowledge workers. I think the attitude of management towards McDonald's staff is a clear example of why preserving the notion of a knowledge worker is still important.

For those insisting on a definition of "knowledge worker", mine is quite simple: it's being employed for the knowledge you bring rather than the knowledge you will be taught.

Yes, it's a simplification and ignores a lot of edge cases, but it captures an important large chunk of the difference.

My previous post took on a life of its own, which was originally intended to highlight a Joel on Software article on Biculturalism from 2003:

... So you get these religious arguments. Unix is better because you can debug into libraries. Windows is better because Aunt Marge gets some confirmation that her email was actually sent. Actually, one is not better than another, they simply have different values: in Unix making things better for other programmers is a core value and in Windows making things better for Aunt Marge is a core value.

One of the signs of a maturing discipline is that change gets slower. I'm think that IT is reaching that point.

I mean, what can you do today with IT that you couldn't do three years ago? In December 2004, you were operating Windows XP, Firefox 1.0 and Office 2003.

Despite the release of successors to all of these software packages, the features available are still pretty much the same. Really, we've just seen new coats of paint and a few usability improvements. The Internet's still the Internet; word processing is still WYSIWYG; and operating systems are still pretty reliable.

Chronologically, I'd mark these as the major "tipping points" of IT in the last 25 years. These aren't necessarily the first time the concepts were invented, but they were the point at which they crossed into mainstream acceptance:

Hmm. I actually thought I'd written this up a few weeks ago after fixing my annoying Leopard wireless issues. But perhaps not!

Anyhoo, here's how I solved my wireless connectivity problems on a MacBook Pro running Leopard:

(1) Make sure you have all the Mac updates (including the Login & Keychain update).

(2) Open your keychain and remove all entries relating to your wireless key setup.

(3) Start up in Safe Mode by holding the Shift key during startup.

(4) Once the computer has started in Safe Mode, simply restart again (without holding any keys).

MSI files aren't just a complicated ZIP format -- they are also an installation tool and (apparently) a full-fledged SQL database.

So it's great to find MSI Unpacker, a tool that easily allows inspection of (a) what an MSI file would actually change about a system and (b) easily extract files from the MSI package.

I tend to have a love/hate relationship with FileMaker Pro. It certainly has a lower learning curve than a program like Access or using a full-blown relational database with SQL query commands etc.

While that ease of use often generates poorly-thought out databases, and I've had some nightmare experiences with FileMaker developers who can dink up a web-based system but don't really understand the logistics of deploying that to multiple sites over dial-up internet speeds (me? bitter? :) -- when I discovered that XML access has b

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Then the Dotcom-Monitor is for you!