Kevin Daly

Yet more on Diarist with MSN Spaces

OK, I've been trying it for a few days now, and it's definitely working fine now without trying to use the local network setting - so I'm confident that that was simply a business-as-usual Connection Manager glitch connected with the fact that I was using it at one point while the device was cradled and I was getting screen shots of the configuration screen.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that if you're interested, contact me and I'll send you the latest version to try.

About the new-look MSDN Subscriber Downloads area: am I the only person who really, really hates that incredibly slow, unresponsive treeview?

In other news: I've been testing my RSS generation code with both RSS Bandit and SharpReader lately. Once I've got my site up I'll be using it to provide notifications of software updates (as mentioned previously).

Diarist and MSN Spaces - more tests

Well, I had a night's sleep and tried again this morning, and it still works.
It looks like telling the Harrier to use the CDMA radio to connect to private networks did the trick...if anyone can tell me why, or how I can avoid having to do that, I'd appreciate it.
Early on I did have the device cradled with the radio connected (to get screen shots of the configuration process), so possibly some confusion ensued then.

Diarist and MetaWeblog for MSN Spaces

Update 11:08 pm - the problem below did recur - it looks very much like the Harrier decided I was using a local network connection, so I set my local network settings to also be Telecom CDMA, and that seems to have taken care of it. I'll keep testing for another day or two to make sure.

The blogging API for MSN Spaces went live today (-ish...depending on your time zone).
I naturally tested it with Diarist - there was a bug I had to correct before the SSL would work (actually it was a bug in CF 1.0, but it requires a workaround). It looks as if everything's OK...for a while I was getting errors trying to connect from my Harrier (just saying it couldn't connect to the remote server), but I'm not getting them now so unless there's a recurrence I'll put it down to "transient network conditions" (TNC, if you must).
Other than those initial hiccups (and with my fingers crossed against a recurrence of the last) I'm quite pleased: things like dates and categories that often have issues worked perfectly right away.

In addition to fixing the SSL issue, I've also changed the default address for Blogger via Atom to be https (they seem to have finally got around to requiring that while I wasn't looking), and to avoid too much inconvenience with changes like that in future I've made API addresses that default (such as Blogger)  editable.
In addition I've added a menu option for MSN Spaces, so people won't have to key in the address.

I'll make the Spaces-friendly version available as soon as it's fully tested and I'm confident it won't suddenly fall over, but for the next week or two you'll have to ask me for a copy via the Contact form and I'll email you the CAB file - the plug gets pulled on my free hosting on www.aspxconnection.com tomorrow, so there won't be anywhere to download from until I've made alternative arrangements (as soon as possible).

For the same reason I've removed the download links and images from some of the posts I've made here, since they were linked to the same site.
When my hosting is taken care of I'll tidy up and republish some of the better ones as proper articles on the new site.

Diarist news, fun with .NET 2, and stuff (updated 7/12/06 7:36 am for clarity. No, honestly)

Odds and ends in other words.
Firstly, I'm pleased to say I've tested Diarist with the beta of the MetaWeblog API for MSN Spaces and I can say with confidence that on the basis of those tests, once the latter is released it'll work just fine with the generic MetaWeblog option in Diarist. However, since typing in API endpoints when configurating an account can be just a teensy bit tedious, I'm going to add a specific menu option for MSN Spaces as soon as I know what the RTM endpoint will be.

If none of the preceding makes sense, don't worry. It'll work. No worries.

I have a few new versions of Diarist to get on with: a version to take advantage of the Compact Framework v2.0 (since I've been diving into C# 2.0 in more detail lately I've decided to do more extensive refactoring that I'd originally planned...there's a lot I now have the opportunity to improve), possibly a separate version for Windows Mobile 5.0 (although I'm leaning towards a slightly different approach to that, which I'll have more to say about later), and two Smartphone versions (one v1.0 and one v2.0) - thanks to Stefano Demiliani for that idea.
So that will keep me busy.

I'm currently hunting for cheap ASP.NET 2 hosting, preferably here in New Zealand (it makes contacting telephone support less awkward). Once I've taken care of that I plan to launch a more extensive monument to my ego web site than my current little corner of www.asxconnection.com, where I'll post some tidied up versions of some of my more coherent and useful posts as articles, and include not only software downloads (as now), but also provide RSS feeds so anyone who's interested will know when there's a software update available. I'd better start thinking of domain names (let's all hope I do a better job of that than application names).

Over the past few evenings I've been doing some work with ASP.NET 2 custom controls...I love being able to put control-related Javascript in a normal, civilised script file and include it as an embedded resource (as described in an earlier post - that code by the way works fine with the RTM version).
I had a few hours of confusion when I was converting a date input control that adjusts itself to the local culture settings: since it's a composite control I thought it would be reasonable to make it inherit from the new CompositeControl class. Then I couldn't understand why it kept cloning itself in the designer...sort of control cancer. Eventually I decided that it was a side-effect of the fact that most of the child controls are actually added to the Controls collections of three placeholder controls - by changing which ones I add which controls to I'm able to change the order in which the controls are rendered quite easily. But I think that was throwing off the designer and causing them to be instantiated again if I sneezed.
Anyway, it's working fine now (but back to inheriting from WebControl and implementing INamingContainer itself)

Hidden gem of .NET 2.0: the use of Predicates with generic collection classes. That basically lets you write search queries (among other things) against a collection of objects - you don't even have to wait for LINQ. I could have done with that about six months ago.

Current favourite VS 2005 feature: DataSet/DataTable Visualizers. These are already being a great help to me at work right now (well, not at this very moment, because I'm at home, but you know what I mean). Being able to see the contents of a DataTable in row/column format seems like a simple thing, but it's a huge boost to productivity. It also cuts down on my use of excessively colourful language in the work place.

Lastly, I'm hoping to but a Windows Mobile 5.0 device soon but aside from seasonal poverty, one problem I've found is that while the Jasjar is almost a perfect match for my ideal specifications in some respects (VGA, keyboard, all the wireless options covered, and works with GSM networks and therefore fits with my goal to move back to Europe early next year), I'm concerned by what I've heard about it being pretty consistently slow, and the dearth of usable RAM at run time. Good grief, I just said "dearth". In an actual sentence. Oh well.
...So I think I'll wait a few months and see how things settle (and what ROM updates become available).