It's what every technical writer fears: the moment you complete your latest book/article, what you write about either becomes obsolete or impossible for people to use. This has happened to me a couple notable times before with book projects, but recently revealed it's ugly head with my latest 4Guys article Querying XML Data with XQuery. In this article I discussed XQuery, a syntax for querying XML documents. While XQuery has yet to reach a w3c standards point, it is very stable and Microsoft has (had?) released a .NET XQuery engine, available for free at XQueryServices.com. The article demonstrates how to use the XQuery engine from XQueryServices.com on an ASP.NET Web page. I published this article on 4Guys last week and, naturally, XQueryServices.com is now down.
If anyone from Microsoft is reading this, or if anyone has a Microsoft contact in the XML department, I have a few quick questions I'd love to have answered:
- Is XQueryServices.com down for the count, or just temporarily? It appears to be down right at this moment (Monday, July 28 11:00 AM PST), and this messageboard post makes it look as if it's been down for at least 24 hours prior to now. So, what's the long-term status?
- Can I publically provide the xquery.msi file that folks can download from XQueryServices.com? Currently, the article has a link to download this MSI file from XQueryServices.com, but given the less than reliable nature of the XQueryServices.com Web site, I would like to host the file on 4Guys - is this acceptable?
Thanks to anyone who can help!