# State of play... ## State of play... posted on Monday, February 14, 2005 1:57 PM Well, sorry I've been light on the posting for a couple of weeks - been a bit caught up in some stuff going on (my uncle died) as well as starting a new project at work. I haven't been entirely away from blogs though, here's a few articles I've been reading recently: - [XML Performance Checklist, and some issues on XPath evaluation](http://weblogs.asp.net/cazzu/archive/2004/06/19/159897.aspx) - [Neural Networks in .NET](http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/neural_dot_net.asp) - [Customize User interfaces and Pass User Information to Installer Classes](http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/Code/2002/Nov/CustomUI.asp) - [Customizing your .NET deployment projects](http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/Code/2003/Dec/CustomInstallMG.asp) Also been buying a couple of decent books (and a couple of crap ones which I won't mention) - [ASP.NET Cookbook](http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596003781/mostlylucid-21)-Pretty decent book, lots of little ASP.NET snippets, not for pure beginners but has some interesting solutions to stuff which can be confusing. - [Head First Design Patterns](http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596007124/mostlylucid-21) - Certainly provides a novel way to examine the use and implementation of many of the GoF patterns, unfortunately it's in Java so yopu have to do a bit of manipulation to get the examples working in C# (also you have to know when C# implementations are different than Java, e.g. delegates and attributes) - [The Definitive Guide to Windows Installer](http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1590592972/mostlylucid-21) - Basically covers how to use Windows Installer, good book but I'd have like to have seen more involved coverage of using VS.NET - covers it but kind of lacks the depth I wanted. - [Artificial Intelligence : A Guide To Intelligent Systems](http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321204662/mostlylucid-21) - Not actually got this yet, my current minor obsession (influenced by [this video](http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=40064) on [Channel9)](http://channel9.msdn.com) - [Introduction To Machine Learning](http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262012111/mostlylucid-21)- As above...looks like a pretty decent book. Apart from that, I'm currently looking at using the [XPathNavigator](http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/cpref/html/frlrfSystemXmlXPathXPathNavigatorClassTopic.asp) for use in a path-sensitive URL rewriting system for a new application I'm building at work- so urls like http://me/you/other/thisitem.aspx can be mapped dynamically on to a 'sitemap-like' navigation structure. Trying to avoid using RegEx based rewriting ala .TEXT - in mine the path defines the context so I don't need to carry object identity information in the URL e.g., [http://www.mostlylucid.co.uk/archive/2005/02/04/1649.aspx](/archive/2005/02/04/1649.aspx) - in mine I would have the path info as well as the object identity statically mapped in XML (well, editable but rarely updated...). Any opinions / great implementations you've seen of this sort of thing (information on most efficient in-memory storage using binary-search-trees (e.g., [Scott Mitchell's series on data structures](http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dv_vstechart/html/datastructures_guide.asp)) etc...would be greatly appreciated)