Extracting information from PubMed

I'm working on some analysis of PubMed data and have run into some difficulties.

• Corresponding author

I can't find any way to identify the "corresponding" author in a pubmed record
I dont' think is correct to simply use the last author.
There is sometimes an email address in the affiliations tag, but no way to tell which author it corresponds to.

• Author institutions

There is an affiliation section, but it's not complete and there's no way to tell which author it corresponds to.

• Author names

Sometimes authors are listed with first and last names, sometimes the first name is just initials though. It's not always easy to infer this

Anybody know how to acquire this information?

asp.net hates < script />

I just discovered an unfortunate bug(?) in asp.net.

With:

< source="scriptfile.js">

My page always generates an Event Validation exception on postback.
Simply changing it to:

< source="scriptfile.js"> <>

eliminates the exception without having to disable Event Validation

Just discovered wcsf...

Relative to xsd.exe, WCSF is vastly superior.

It generates reasonable names

It uses generics.

It has a user interface.

One problem...

constructs using choice like this

  < xs:element name="Amount">
    < xs:complexType>
      < xs:choice>
        < xs:element ref="MassAmount"/>
        < xs:element ref="VolumeAmount"/>
      </xs:choice>
    </xs:complexType>
  </xs:element>

generate crappy C# code like this:

       [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlElementAttribute("MassAmount", typeof(MassAmount))]
       [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlElementAttribute("VolumeAmount", typeof(VolumeAmount))]
       public object Item
       {
           get
           {
               return this.item;
           }
           set
           {
               if ((this.item != value))
               {
                   this.item = value;
               }
           }
       }

Why couldn't that just allow setting one or the other enum?

GetActiveIter

There is no GetActiveIter method in the TreeView class.

I view this as inconsistent.  Both ComboBoxes and TreeViews can handle muliple selections, they should have similar interfaces.

Workaround:

You must use  .Selection.GetSelected(Out iter) instead.

Gtk# annoyances

I've kept some notes as I learned Gtk# . In the next few postings I'll comment on what features have annoyed me and how I dealt with them.

Use of "out" parameters for varous methods.

Eg: The GetActiveIter of the ComboBox classes use an Out paramter instead of just returning the iter.

I'm annoyed by this because I don't want to have to instantiate a variable when I just need  the current iter for a moment.

I've heard the argument that by returning a bool indicating success or failure you can save some checking effort, but I think returning null on failure would be just as good.

Workaround:

Obviously, you just declare a variable to store the active iter.