August 2004 - Posts

E-mail to RSS

Lately I had to sign up to a site to get access to the answers to questions posted on their forum. How did I know that the site had answers? Well, Google showed me the question and part of the answer when I searched for the exact error message for a problem I was having, but when I followed the link from Google to the site I found I couldn't view the answer unless I became a (free) member.
 
I retreated back to Google to find to my dismay that there's no cached copy of the page I want. So, I became a member of the site, found the answer, and moved on. Now, two weeks later, I notice I've got two weekly newsletters from the site in my inbox.
 
This is not a problem as the newsletter is actually quite good, but it's just that I don't want to put aside time to read mailing-list type stuff on my personal e-mail. Luckily this site has the option not to receive newsletters and has an RSS feed, so I can still read the content when I read my feeds and my inbox stays clean.
 
I did some quick hunting around to find two sites that will give out an e-mail address and then allow you to subscribe to your “inbox” using RSS:
 
This seems like a useful service to have. I'll give one or both of them a try and see how I go.
 
UPDATE: To use MailbyRss you sign up, they provide you with an e-mail address (a GUID), and whenever you mail something to this mail address it is “posted” to a web page that's kind of like a blog-lite, which has an RSS feed. Pretty simple. MailbyRss allows two optional tags in the e-mail that you send to be “posted” - an abstract for the entry, and an alternate date for the date of the posting.
 
MailbyRss looks like it is set up for corporate users as a subset of a larger suite of tools. Its creators advertise it as another information stream to potential buyers of your product or existing users for support.
 
The advantages of MailbyRss are that it would be hard for someone to guess the e-mail address used to post. The resulting content is available to anyone, though.
 
MailBucket seems similar but both the e-mail used to post and the resulting content are open to anyone. It seems to be targeted at developers who do not have time to read all the posts on a mailing list and instead prefer to consume the information using RSS. I think the downfall is lack of unique identity - there's no sign up, just check if your desired address is in use (the e-mail address for the “inbox“ becomes the web address to get the RSS from) - which means mailing list information I send to a MailBucket e-mail address might be hijacked by someone else (unless I'm getting the site horribly wrong, which is a possibility).
posted Sunday, August 29, 2004 8:51 PM by thomasswilliams with 0 Comments

Local Weather via RSS

This is a good utilisation of an existing technology e.g. airport locations, free weather availability and RSS (via Alex Barnett). This link lists countries outside the US and Canada that the service supports, and Melbourne weather is here (using ICAO code YMML).

This is handy to be able to tell the wife when it's OK to hang washing on the line, or to know if I need my umbrella to walk out to the car. I don't know if I've got a use for visibility, windspeed, and barometer readings just yet, but it is handy to have this kind of news delivered to me if I need it.

posted Friday, August 20, 2004 3:01 PM by thomasswilliams with 2 Comments

Determining if you have Windows XP SP2

With Windows XP Service Pack 2 released, it would be handy to determine if you have it installed programatically (using C# or VB.NET). Saar Carmi points me in the right direction to KB 304721.

Related is KB 304283 which explains how to find out Windows versions in C# using the System.Environment.OSVersion structure (I don't know if it detects SP2, as I don't have SP2 yet...at least now I'm able to check!)

posted Friday, August 20, 2004 2:42 PM by thomasswilliams with 0 Comments

Geek Laughs

Only a geek could laugh at some of the jokes Devankur Thakur has collected.

I also found out my brother likes Dilbert, I thought I was the only one in my family!

posted Friday, August 13, 2004 2:20 PM by thomasswilliams with 0 Comments

Build Regime (or lack of)

As mentioned before, I pretty much work in a one-developer shop. This is not an excuse!

When I started a fairly sizable project last year, I tried to start off right and set up CVS for source control, learned how to use NAnt to build my solution, did some playing with NUnit for tests and also set up NDoc to do my documentation.

A year and a half later I look back with regret that I ditched all of these in favor of...nothing. I was worried about the maintenance around my whole “build regime“ and it seemed like all my effort was adding nothing of value to the project. I deleted my NAnt build files, didn't keep up with the many NUnit upgrades and add-ins and have not got any documentation to show.

My project is getting bigger and bigger (of course!) and I hope I'm learning my lesson - that tools like I've mentioned keep things in check rather than add to the complexity in the long run. So now I'm leaning back towards NAnt, I've swapped to Subversion (which I've pretty much installed) for source control and I'm trying to find good bug/issue tracking software for when my app goes out “into the wild”.

To get me started I'm looking at a great article on 15 Seconds called “Using Open Source .NET Tools for Sophisticated Builds”, and also Jan Tielens' NAnt BuildFile Builder (via Girish).

posted Tuesday, August 10, 2004 3:20 PM by thomasswilliams with 0 Comments

Inductive User Interface MSDN Sample, in VB.NET

Michael Weinhardt's excellent article IUIs and Web-Style Navigation in Windows Forms, Part 1 describes how to create an “inductive” (I consider it to be like a task-based) user interface, like the Windows XP "Workgroup-Mode User Account Management" or the Office 2003 Research Pane. I can't do a very good job explaining inductive versus deductive user interfaces; there's an old article at MSDN that gives the complete run-down.

The other day and had a play around with the download which is in C#. Michael has created a neat little way to get a wizard-like interface (that's also capable of much more) and Windows Forms as almost web pages inside a container. Each “page” is designed using the Visual Studio designer window, allowing for a lot of control.

Converting the sample app that uses Michael's C# “Navigation“ framework to VB.NET was fairly straightforward using the C# to VB.NET Translator - I created a new VB.NET project and converted one file from the MSDN sample, "PageTemplate.cs", to "PageTemplate.vb", and then the other pages inherit from this - and only a simple change in syntax is necessary for “hyperlinking“ to pages:

C# syntax for displaying a page: Go(typeof(<form>));
VB.NET syntax: Go(GetType(<form>))

I hope this helps anyone attempting to work with the MSDN sample in VB.NET 2003. I don't have anywhere to post the VB.NET project, please let me know if it would be of use to you.

posted Friday, August 06, 2004 11:08 AM by thomasswilliams with 0 Comments