Read Eric von Hippel's Democratizing Innovation, looks at the sort of ideas/products that come from users and how to encourage them. In software this is all about hacking and how to encourage it via frameworks. I'm becoming quietly obsessed with innovation, user re-purposing and hacks, to wit: my subscription to Make magazine; re-reading of Clayton Christensen; addiction to the conferences on IT Conversations. I've now started on Dan Gilmor's We The Media, which deals with some similar ideas and is fascinating.

On Sunday I found an incredibly obvious but hitherto undiscovered problem with my research project. I had been executing XPath and XQuery expressions against XML representations of each loaded project within Visual Studio. Then I tried out this XQuery:

for $c in //class for $m in $c/method[@visibility='Public']
for $client in //method
for $clientCall in $client/body/methodCall
where $c/attributes/attribute[@type='Demo1_Common.TrustDomainBoundaryAttribute']
and $clientCall/@name = $m/@name
and $clientCall/@type = concat($c/@namespace, '.', $c/@name)
return $client

(Translation: if there is a class with the attribute 'TrustDomainBoundary', find any method that calls into a public method on that class)

Because my schema is a fairly literal translation of IL, this just didn't work for method calls between assemblies, since it requires data from assembly A (the custom attribute and method visibilities) and from assembly B (the method body for any calling methods). God bless NUnit, I was able to extend pretty quickly to use multi-assembly XML.

Had two great discussions on my Visual Studio 2005 / DSL tools project with the very helpful people from Microsoft on Monday. On the DSL tools front, I think I am going to totally re-build my UI based on the functionality in the next DSL tools release and then freeze it. Not sure exactly what it will look like, but I'll settle on the final UI this month. I also had a very interesting chat about different approaches to schematising source code. At the moment I'm disassembling IL and PDBs to produce XML, but I can escape some limitations and bugs by going to a hybrid approach bringing in data from CodeModel and IL. I'll try it this weekend.

via Amazon, a Logic3 i-Station 2.1 Sub-woofer Speakers and Docking Station for iPod, currently playing Welcome to the Working Week.