Niels SQL Server Blog

Last week I taught Notification Services in Charlotte, NC. I had a great bunch of students and at least I had a great time. Thanks guys!!

Notification Services (NS) is a technology which allows you to develop and deploy applications which sends out notifications/messages to thousands or millions of subscribers. These messages can be personalized and sent to different devices like; e-mail, IM, SMS, MSN Alerts, etc.

This is a great technology, but unfortunately it has very limited tool support. In other wrds, there is no NS project type in Visual Studio, and no wizards etc. An NS application consists basically of two XML configuration files which are run through an executable from command line. With no tool support you have to hand code your XML files, which is not hard but tedious and error prone.

So one night after class I thought about Infopath and decided to test to see what I could do (background - I have done very, very little with Infopath before). I fired up Infopath, pointed it to the schema file for one of the necessary configuration files and hey presto! Twenty minutes later I had something looking like a form for data entry for one of the configuration files (the config file that required least information :-)).

These last days I have created the form for the second config file, plus I have tried to make the forms a little bit more readable with colors etc. (once again, I'm no UI guy and I have precious little experience with Infopath - so don't laugh).

If you are interested, they are uploaded to here. Have fun!!