Raise the SNR

A little preface for this entry:

I have been developing on Microsoft platforms since the late  1980’s. However, I’ve always been fascinated with Apple products. So I decided to buy
a MacBook Pro. I can run Windows on a VM because it’s running an Intel processor, and I can experiment with the Mac and try my hand at developing for it.

That being said, I was registering for a Microsoft Developer event and was prompted to add the event to my calendar. Since iCal on the Mac can read ics and vcal files, I accepted. Then iCal displayed the following error:

“The calendar file is unreadable. No events have been added to your iCal calendar.”

Browsing the ics file in TextWrangler revealed the following:

BEGIN:vCalendar
VERSION:2.0
METHOD:PUBLISH
BEGIN:vEvent
DTSTART:20071201T230000Z
DTEND:20071202T010000Z
UID:11111111111
DTSTAMP:20071130T175905Z
DESCRIPTION: We look forward to seeing you at the Event!
SUMMARY:In-Person Event - Meeting
PRIORITY:3
BEGIN:vAlarm
TRIGGER:P0DT0H15M
ACTION:DISPLAY
DESCRIPTION:Reminder
END:vAlarm
END:vEvent
END:vCalendar

I only found a couple of search hits on Google, but everything that I did find showed that certain key words were capitalized (strings after BEGIN: and END:). So I capitalized the strings after the BEGIN and END tags and tried to re-import the ics file. This time it was successful. I don’t know if there is a global specification for ics files, so I can’t say who’s to blame here. I do know that iCal expects VCALENDAR, VEVENT, and VALARM tags to be capitalized.