I have created a new repository on GITHUB.com for a tiny little application that I wrote to demonstrate custom C# events.

https://github.com/dgrinberg/TextFileSplitter 

TextFileSplitter is a small utility windows application, written in C#, that will split a text file based on a character.

It was used as the basis for a previous blog post written on custom C# event handling

HL7Snoop is a tiny little Windows application that simply parses HL7 files and presents the data in a much more human readable format. It displays the data in a tree format, preserving the data heirachy of the message. It also displays the field name, as per the HL7 standards.

It uses the NHapi library to parse the message and the field names are retrieved from the NHapi model definitions.

The beauty of HL7 is that each minor release of the standard is supposed to be backward compatible, at least within the V2.x series. When a new version of the standard is released it does not remove fields or segments from the standard, it just adds new fields. Fields may be deprecated, but their position still remains within the message. This means that an interface written to accept V2.5 messages should understand messages built using the V2.3 standard.

The majority of my career I have created software for the health industry. A lot of my time has been spent integrating disparate health systems, using the health industry interoperability standard HL7. Very basically HL7, as an interoperability standard, defines everything from protocol through to message structure. However this article is not meant to be an intro into HL7, so if you are after more info visit http://www.hl7.org/.