Validating CDA documents in C# seems to be a bit tricky… At first, I started out just copying the infrastructure and processable schemas to a project and creating the code to use those schemas to validate. Unfortunately, I kept getting errors like “Missing complexType ‘II’ used in restriction base”. The II type is defined in datatypes-base, and the element it was error out on was the POCD_MT000040.InfrastructureRoot.typeId complex type.

I still have no idea what the issue is here… The schemas validate without problem in Eclipse, Oxygen and even XMLSpy.

I ended up having to flatten the schemas into a single file. I believe the issue has something to do with namespaces that I don’t fully understand; so if anyone out here has the answer, please comment.

Generating C# code from the CDA schemas is a little different than in my previous article about XCA implementation… With XCA, svcutil doesn’t recognize <import> and <include> so you have to specify each XSD and WSDL on the command-line of the svcutil call. However, with CDA it is the exact opposite.

I started out trying to generate code with XSD.exe using the same methodology as with the XCA schemas.. However, after removing the <import> and <include> elements from the schemas, flattening the hierarchy and specifying all the XSD files on the command-line I ended up getting a ton of errors about missing elements.

So, eventually I got around to trying to just run XSD.exe with the root XSD and using the same schema hierarchy that is packed in the normative edition of CDA… Which worked.

1) Copy infrastructure and processable directories from normative cda to a directory on your drive.

2) Open a visual studio command prompt.

3) CD to the infrastructure directory.

4) Run “xsd.exe CDA.xsd /classes /language:C#”

A while back I began working on a project where I had to develop an XCA service. For those of you who don.t know what XCA is, see this: Cross-Community Access (XCA). XCA is a supplement of the XDS.b standard, which is Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (the .b. as opposed to .a. for the older version). Well, I find that there is plenty of specifications on XCA and XDS.b in PDF form, but they seem to focus on the format of data being sent over the wire, not really how to implement the service that communicates that format of data.

Initially, someone told me that I could just generate code out of the XSD and WSDL. This sounded great in theory and I had done that for working with CDA documents, but in this case when I tried to use XSD.exe to generate objects for the RIM.xsd schema it gave me a number of errors that elements were missing, so I gave up on that after reading articles on the internet where other people were having similar problems. One statement indicated .IHE is working on creating an XSD that is compatible with Microsoft.s XSD.exe tool, and will be out shortly.. Unfortunately, that post was made quite a while ago and I couldn.t find anything about a newer version from IHE.

So, instead I looked into using Microsoft.s implementation of XDS as an example to implement just my own little pieces. Their interfaces used a very odd approach of accepting (and responding with) raw System.ServiceModel.Channels.Message objects. In this case, I parsed and created raw XML and converted that raw XML into the Message object.

My most recent work has put me in a position to learn a great deal more about the health care IT industry. It has been quite an interesting learning curve over the past few months. Looking back, I.ve worked on hospital scheduling systems for an extensive period of time, then coincidentally lead the development of a claims administration system and now I.m learning about another corner of the industry (clinical documentation).

CDA is short for Clinical Document Architecture, which is a standard based on a standard called the HL7 RIM . reference information model. CDA, essentially, defines the XML-based structure in which a doctor can report information on procedures, allergies, diagnosis (etc) for a patient.

The full CDA specification can be found here.

A couple days back I installed Outlook 2010 Beta because I read an article about it that described a couple features that I could really use. So far, I must say, I am really impressed with the product. Although the interface hasn.t been changed that much, the changes that they did make to it sure do look nice.

So, here.s the doozy feature: Support for multiple exchange accounts in a single profile. This is a huge deal for me. I have several exchange accounts that I have to keep up with and the current version of outlook (2007) just doesn.t make that very easy.

Earlier I was thinking about all the different tools I use and how neat they are and I thought I would share the (vast?) list of tools with everyone and individual thoughts on them.

Productivity

- Microsoft Office 2007

- Outlook: The best email tool, ever. I use outlook in conjunction with http://www.myhosting.com (for exchange server email @ $10/mo) and a couple other IMAP email addresses. I synch my phone up with my calendar, tasks, contacts and email and am able to track all of my day-to-day stuff in one single place. I even have pictures associated with each contact (where possible) so that my Windows Mobile 6.1 phone displays their picture when they call.

- Word

- Excel: The ability to perform in-line calculations on spreadsheets is wonderful. I love many of google.s apps, but they try to put too many of them in the browser. The browser still lacks a lot of functionality. The browser should display content, not provide a full user interface to a complex application like excel.

- Access

A while back I ran into some issues with my system getting BSOD'd... The dell online chat representative (after remote assisting me) suggested that I re-install windows. After I did that I could no longer properly use my bluetooth headset devices.

Today, I spent about 30 minutes with another dell online chat representative trying to fix this issue (watching them remote assist my computer)... In the end, they told me they could not figure it out and could only suggest that speak with an On-Call representative (which costs money, of course). They told me that everything was fine with my system and that the problem must be with my bluetooth headset, which was not supported by them because it was not Dell.

Any developer that has programmed PHP can recognize that PHP was intended for Linux distributions and web servers. However, coming from a windows background I generally fancy windows web servers (not Linux). Don.t get me wrong, I am very familiar with Linux and at one point ran my own Linux servers and X-Windows desktops. However, I do believe that Microsoft is making good headway with web servers (II7), web services (WCF) and web applications (handy APIs such as Silverlight and WPF). Every one of these products have impressed me greatly.

Now, I am faced with a decision to make. Use PHP or use C#? Hands down I prefer C#. However, this project I am going to be working on is going to involved with a person that prefers PHP. This got me thinking. Why not use both? If I am going to be handling the back-end side of the web application and the other person is going to be handling the front-end, there doesn.t seem to me to be any reason why we shouldn.t use both! Now I need a proof of concept. I need to be able to feel confident that if I offer this as a suggestion (front-end done in PHP which calls the back-end WCF web services done in C#) then I need to be able to show that it works well (efficiently, cleanly, etc).

So my home server has been running now for almost a week (sort of). On Saturday the power went out in my basement and all my machines were shut off. When I flipped the breaker everything started coming back up and online, except for my new server. I talked to technical support via their email and eventually via phone and all was useless. However, eventually I WAS able to get it back online.

The problem was that the machine SEEMED as though it were booting like normal, but it would never finalize and connect to the network (allowing me to connect to it with WHS Connector). The blue power light would come on, the blue hard drive status lights would flicker for a while, and then the hard drive status light would stop and the .i. status indicator would repeatedly flash (and never stop). The hard drive lights that indicate WHS has loaded the drives into the WHS pool would never come and the network lights would never come on either.

Today I saw about a dozen lines of code in a project that I was working on simply dedicated to determining whether or not there are duplicates within a stringlist (List). This made me start to question whether or not there was a better way of doing this, to which the little light bulb in my head went off and directed me towards LINQ. A quick search on the web for "Finding duplicates with LINQ" landed me at this chunk of code:

Yesterday I received my new Acer easyStore server. For a while now I have been needing a new server and this one caught my eye with the competitive cost and the extra memory. For the same price of the HP home server I was able to get an extra 1.5 gigs of memory, which is perfect for me because I plan on doing more with it than just storing files. In this blog I describe the experiences I have had setting up my home server, such as my smooth initial setup, my troubles with PHP and MySql installation, but my overall satisfaction with the product.

So as it turns out it's not very hard to setup a WCF service so that you can watch the progress of the file uploads to the service. I only found one post online that provided a good demonstration of how to do it and I am going to go over it in again with a few additional notes...

Working with the GDI+ framework is not (in some cases) as trivial as you would think. It may be easy to create a new Bitmap object and draw some primitive shapes and text to it, but when you start trying to use the GDI+ library for changing the format of an Image it gets a little more tricky. Here I am going to discuss some of the ins and outs of working with GDI+ for image formatting, such as creating/saving images and changing image.s formats.

Although the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor is very cool, I find it hard to write articles/blogs with it. For example, depending on your browser the editor seems to display different. In Chrome the editor spans to fill the entire window but in Internet Explorer it only spans to about 500 pixels, then leaves the rest of the window empty. Not only that but on my laptop it works worse with Chrome than it does with Internet Explorer.

To those of you who don.t know what WYSIWYG stands for: .What You See Is What You Get.. This term is typically (at least as far as I know) used for word/document editors and is intended to imply that what you are seeing when you edit the document is what you see when you publish it.

Above all (for me) the editor just doesn.t display formatting quite precisely. Of course the document is going to look different once published to a site with CSS styles applied, but I.ve found that even with just a standard (CSS-less) website it doesn.t come out quite the same. Tables are hard to manipulate and images don.t always align quite right.

WebApp <-> DeskApp Communication

The last several days I have investigated how to get desktop application to communicate with a web application. I would have to assume that this I not a very popular approach because there just doesn.t seem to be very much put in place to allow this. Sure, you can create a web service to act as the middle-man, but I don.t want to. I just want to be able to send a small fragment of data from a .NET desktop application to an ASP.NET web application to indicate that it is done processing. In the end of my research I have only found one approach that REALLY does what I want it to do.

I have now worked on several PHP web-based projects and have learned how the Joomla API works as well as how to build custom components for Joomla. I have even done some minimal work on C#/.Net. However, I haven't once touched java in about 5 years. So, several days ago I began re-kindling the Java "flame". So far things have been going along quite smoothly. I have (much like PHP) noticed some major changes in Java. Mainly the IDE's (again, much like PHP) that are available to develop with. When I worked heavily with PHP the IDE's were not nearly as well developed as they are now. There was no Eclipse PHP or Eclipse Java. There was no debugging PHP. Even syntax highlighting was JUST starting to become popular. Now all of these concepts are well and established and it seems like it is a lot easier to work with.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how best to organize my work. Since I have been laid off I have had to work very hard at getting side-jobs to make the money I need to make. With this, I have found that I have to sell myself as someone who can work in just about any area of the software world (whether it be C#, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Perl, etc). After all, there are thousands of bids going into every single job position and there are probably even more bids going on the free-lancer websites. With so many bids on so many jobs/projects I can't really focus on one specific area. So, I have spent a large deal of time brushing up my "almost-forgotten" languages such as PHP and Java.

However, coming from 6-7 years in the C#/.Net (Aka: the microsoft) world, it can be difficult working in these other languages that are far more suited for linux environments. Let's also not forget that I like my games (like Counter-Strike, Diablo, Prince of Persia, etc). It just so happens that these games don't work very well on linux environments. I started pondering how it is that I can solve this issue without having to have two seperate machines. My friend (the same friend that bad-mouths my windows desktops) mentioned that he uses VMWare for working with multiple operating systems so I decided to give it a try.

Before two months ago (about the time I got laid off) I had never even heard of "Joomla". Very odd name... I stumbled onto the CMS (Content Management Software) from a friend of mine who wanted help with their website (http://www.sizzlencuisine.com). She had previously been working with other website designers and wasn't very happy with their progress/communication (what a shocker). I have now spent a few weeks working very diligently to learn what Joomla is about, how to develop a website with Joomla and even how to develop a custom Joomla component (which I now have available for sale on my website). It has, overall, been an intriguing and experience and one that I find worth sharing.

Earlier I was reminded by why I took on the handle "KbCb" (aka: "Keyboard Cowboy"); My mom called me up and had a laugh with me because one of the people she talked to said she had never met anyone who knew more keyboard shortcuts than me.

I think many people forget to use the keyboard. Even in the windows world the keyboard is far more efficient than any mouse. Very often (well, often enough) I am mocked for using windows - and boy they REALLY get going when they hear I use vista - mainly for the fact that I "have to use a mouse to do anything". Well, I'm here to say that's a BUNCH of bull****.

All you gotta do is take a little time to familiar yourself with the short cuts. Here are the ones that are most common to me, and I will try to keep this up-to-date going forward. Note: I can't imagine that the first shortcuts I list aren't well-known to anyone who has used a computer for a job. So, bare with...