If I need to sketch something quickly, I use Dia. It's lightweight, has most of the features I normally need, and it doesn't really matter if you're a Windows or a Linux user--you can get a build that fits either: http://live.gnome.org/Dia/Download[^]

We started getting requests to provide estimates for our development tasks, and I'm just wondering if there is a distinct breakdown into the technical design, implementation, and testing stages (from a developer's perspective) at other people's shops. If there is, I'd be curious to know what the ratios are (e.g. how much of the total development effort is spent on the technical design part, assuming you already have the preliminary specs?).

Here's a link to an introductory article on UML: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/769.html[^] You can also check out the Resources section at the end of the article as well as search developerWorks for more.

This is a new area for me and I'm still hacking my way through it, so I would greatly appreciate any insight or a push in the right direction. I have a process that needs to be notified when dhclient (which is launched by an unrelated process in another application) finishes configuring the network device and fetches the IP address and all. Is there a way to hook into dhclient for the first process to get notification events from dhclient? I'm currently considering doing it from the dhclient-exit-hooks script that is invoked on dhclient exit, but I am curious if OMAPI can be used instead? The man-page for dhclient says such control of dhclient is possible through the use of OMAPI, but the man-pages for OMAPI and and dhcpctl claim it's used to get info from the DHCP server only...

Great, thank you! I put the XSD file two directories up, so the following two lines now do the trick: DirectoryInfo schemaDir = (Directory.GetParent(Application.StartupPath)).Parent).Parent; string schemaFullName = schemaDir + Path.DirectorySeparatorChar + "OptionsSchema.xsd";

Perhaps this is a rather basic question, but is there a way to get the path to an XSD file (considering it's added to my current project) without having to hard-code the path?

Excellent! I just tried your solution and it works (not being able to edit the projects' properties in the designer view is a bummer, but editing them manually does the trick). Thank you, Phil! Vladimir

You can check out "C# Cookbook" written by Jay Hilyard and Stephen Teilhet: there are a lot of useful examples there. Perhaps, you'll be able to find something that'll suit you. Good luck! Vladimir

Hi Rahi, Just like you, I'm new to .NET and had a similar question a couple of months ago. While I will not be able to provide a comprehensive answer as to when and where to use XML, I can tell what I've done with it, and maybe it'll help you see one of its uses. I've been working on the client side of an application that uses web services provided by a number of search engines. Before the user can start querying the search engines, he needs to specify some data, such as the names of the supported seach engines to use, the number of queries to submit per engine, the names of the files containing the queries, etc. Squeezing all these options into one interface along with the actual "start-stop-search feature" would make for a busy-looking GUI, especially since the ultimate client does not need to have access to all these options all the time--only to the start-stop-search feature and an options file containing all that info. So as not to hardcode the search options, I split the application in two: if the user has an options file (with all these options set), he can simply specify it in the dialog box and click the "Start Search" button. If there is no such file, he can click on the menu option that starts the other form with the GUI allowing him to fill in the data and create an options file. I use XML to store the data created by the options builder form into the options file. When the user specifies the options file (containing all this data); he only sees a very simple GUI, where he needs to specify the location of the options file and click the "Start Search" button. While the user doesn't mess with XML at all, the application does, since the format helps it access the data in a more organized manner, where I can extract the relevant data, say for the number of queries for Google, Yahoo, or MSN by extracting the data in the options file stored under the tag of "GoogleQueries", "YahooQueries", or "MSNQueries". Hope this makes it a little clearer for you. If not, you may want to grab a book (I used "C# Programming") and take a look at the examples given there. Vladimir

Hello, I have two projects (say proj1 and proj2) that are part of one solution. Both of them need to access a resource (.resx) file, which I can only add to one of the projects (say, to proj2). Is there a more graceful way of accessing this resource file (or making it common to both projects) than explicitly loading the assembly that references the .resx file into the one that doesn't? Thank you.