Sunday, January 29, 2006

Visual Mind to MindManager

A customer of ours asked us how to get data from Visual Mind to MindManager. I went to the Visual Mind website and downloaded their free trial software, created a simple map and selected the file save option to save the file as XML.
As you may know, MindManager X5 and 6 are based on XML and transforming one XML format to another XML format is a trivial exercise (for me) using XSLT. The basic requirement is that the input XML be well-formed. This transformation can happen automatically during file opening and saving in MindManager X5 Pro and MindManager Pro 6 if you have installed additional inbound and oubound transformations.
The problem that I ran into was that the XML produced by Visual Mind is not well-formed so it could not be transformed using XSLT. You can easily see the error if you open the Visual Mind XML in Internet Explorer. If you are a Visual Mind customer (strangely we don't have any at Mindjet). Tell them about this problem and maybe they can fix it.

Michael

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

.Net 2.0 Growing Pains

Now that Microsoft has released the .Net framework 2.0 with Visual Studio 2005, we have noticed some good things and some bad things:
The Good:
Once you install the .Net framework 2.0, the Research Accelerator works with Web Proxy Servers. It did not with 1.1.

The Bad:
Once you install the .Net framework 2.0, the Salesforce.com Accelerator will start exhibiting errors when refreshing building and refreshing maps. We will fix this but in the meantime, the Salesforce.com Accelerator is incompatible with .Net framework 2.0.