Using the XMLTransmit pipeline to write your own custom XML declaration

A question in the MSDN BizTalk Forums caught my eye a few days ago. It was about wanting to set the attribute standalone="yes" in the XML declaration on an outbound message.

I have never had the need to set this attribute before, so wasn't sure of whether the map properties or any other setting could make it be written. The other responses in the thread told be that it couldn't. It was then I thought of an old post I wrote regarding using the XMLTransmit pipeline properties to write an xml-stylesheet reference to a message. This surely had to be able to write a custom XML declaration instead. And it did.

What you basically do is set the property AddXmlDeclaration to false, and then write your full custom XML declaration in the property XmlAsmProcessingInstructions. This will write out your custom string as the XML declaration. Or in reality, it will not write it as the declaration, but since we omit the real one, it will take the place of it.

Just make sure to have the other properties correctly set (the charset) or it might not match the document itself which may or may not cause havok in the receiving end.

Faster filtering in PowerShell than using Where-Object

In a project I'm using a PowerShell script to read in a lot of .csv files and then do some lookups between these in order to get the wanted output. This all works well, but has been a bit slow lately due to a lot more data in the files.

I narrowed the speed issue down to a few lines where I iterate over some files in order to find a few rows that I need. Basically, the Where-Object cmdlet is the culprit.

A simplified example is below:

$mycsvfile = Import-Csv .\mydata.csv
$dataiwant = $mycsvfile | Where-Object {$_.idno -eq 5}

I had a few similar lines in the script, making the time to select the data add upp to 9 seconds, which was far to long in this case.

I found this post that show a few variants on filtering collections, and by simply using the PS v4 .Where() notation to do the same thing, I could bring this down to a single second.

$mycsvfile = Import-Csv .\mydata.csv
$dataiwant = $mycsvfile.Where({$_.idno -eq 5})

So lesson learned: PowerShell is evolving quickly and what I thought was a nice way to do something might very well be just fine, but there might also be a quicker way just around the corner. In this example, I'm sacrificing the streaming capabilities, but gain a lot of performance, just by changing a few characters.

XSD in Visual Studio and the warning message "Request for the permission of type 'System.Security.Permissions.FileIOPermission"

When working in a project in Visual Studio that had a schema repository added, the warning message "Request for the permission of type 'System.Security.Permissions.FileIOPermission" showed up in various places where I had schema imports. The warning did not show up everywhere though and the project built just fine.

It turned out that the reason was that some of the xsd files where downloaded or copied from a network share and were therefore blocked in Windows, leading up to the warning message.

The warnings could be removed by simply unblocking the offending files, and restarting Visual Studio.

This also lead me to the quick way to unblock a lot of files at once. Simply use PowerShell to iterate over the files and use the Unblock-File cmdlet:
gci -r | Unblock-File