The following two projects, the Miart Xml Editor and the Miart MDB Editor are essentially technology playgrounds for the development of two useful utility tools, well, useful to me at least.  There are two data formats that we (Miart) often have to work with in our professional lives, XML and MDB (the Microsoft’s Access database format).  As such we are regularly looking around the internet for free editors that fulfil our needs, for XML there a quite a few to choose from, for MDB databases not so many.  Over the years I have written a number of tools for our clients to perform tasks such as transforming XML and managing and editing data in MDB files, so … I may as well put some of this knowledge to use and build my very own.

The plan is to make the code open source and to use as many open source components as possible.  Partly I have to admit, with being so busy at times; it would help to have some the building blocks already in place, such as text editors etc. Also, up until recently, I have avoided the open source movement, but with the current developments (and maturity) in Linux and Windows open source software, I feel the need to join in.      

For the MDB editor, I plan to support the creation and modification of Access 97-2007 databases along with the basic ability to edit the contained data. As the tool will support modifying the database, I will probably use ADO, ADOX and JRO rather than ado.net, at least for now. The GUI will definitely be in C# anyway.        

The XML editor will be a much simpler affair, allowing the viewing and editing of XML data, and long with searching (XPath, XQuery, etc) and transformations (XSLT). The key feature will be that tool will support multiple parsers, so I can tell the different behaviours between the MSXML3, MSXML4, MSXML6, xml.net and other third party parsers.  Again the GUI will be written in C#, and I am going to have a go at porting it to mono of I can (not all of the parsers will be supported of course).