Kevin Daly

Productivity

Thought for the day: If I thought lines of code were truly a useful measure of productivity, I'd stop using the ternary operator.

But I won't.

Community Server 2.1 and newMediaObject - (Windows Mobile 5 app CAB link now included)

(Updated 11:07 pm with info about service packs)

In a recent post I mentioned the MetaWeblogAPI's newMediaObject method and the fact that it's finally beginning to be supported by popular blog hosting tools.

Well, a few days ago I went ahead and released version 2.1 of Diarist, with support for uploading image files (jpeg, gif or png...you didn't honestly want tiff did you? from a mobile device?) to blog hosting sites that support newMediaObject.

(I didn't post anything about it at the time because I'm sure that Dotnetjunkies readers are sick of me posting about Diarist updates. I'd write some "How-to"'s but I'm still exhausted from writing code...).

Anyway, this is just a piece of information for people who are hosting their own Community Server 2.1 sites: apparently newMediaObject support was released late last year as an add-on, which you can get here if you don't already have it and haven't installed/don't want to install Service Pack 2 or later.
It was also included in in Service Pack 2 (I think they're up to Service Pack 3 now)

I hope you find that helpful.

Now I'll return to carefully avoiding any British blogs that might contain references to the final episode of Life On Mars (which I won't see for about another year) (...unless some wise company offers me a job over that side of the world, in which case I'll have to get it on DVD. But I digress. Even more than usual).

Update: Thursday, 26/04/2007

Users of Windows Mobile 5 devices or later may be wondering why I'm not using either the image picker or the camera capture dialog.

The first reason (which applies to both) is that the current program is designed to run on both Windows Mobile 5 (or 6) and Windows Mobile 2003 (which doesn't include either of those options).
Regarding the camera capture dialog specifically, the other reason is that I completely forget about it until Jason Barile reminded me.

I've decided however that these omissions create an unnecessarily crappy experience for users of Windows Mobile 5 and later, so I'm planning to make a separate version available for those lucky bast people.

Unfortunately I don't have any way to test the camera functionality in emulation, so I'll probably just go with adding the image picker for now.

 Update: Thursday night

It turns out I didn't need to fork the project at all, or even subclass the main form as I was considering at one time.
One delegate did the trick...I'll post the updated code soon and also some discussion of the coding issues.

Update: Even later on Thursday night (updated a little more subsequently)

Aaarrrggh!!!. I've decided to shelve the image picker support on the  Pocket PC version, at least using a single project for WM2003 and WM5: I found that it bloated the CAB file by almost 200K extra by insisting on deploying the new dlls ) ...not worth it for a pretty picker, especially for people running WM2003 who can't  use it anyway.

When I get around to it I'll create a Windows Mobile 5-only version, I think I know the reason for the bloat issue with the single-project-and-deployment approach.

Update: Wednesday 2/5 (Last update, I promise)

I've created a Windows Mobile 5-only version that includes the visual image picker (er...). I'll update the site before too long with appropriate links, but in the meantime you can get it here.

newMediaObject

A common requirement for blogging applications (and one I haven't implemented) is the ability to upload images to a blog.

The MetaWeblogAPI does provide a mechanism to do this: the newMediaObject method.

Unfortunately this was until recently notable for the fact that precious few blogging engines implemented it (which is why I haven't done anything about it).

...But now, well, things are changing: recent releases of both Community Server and dasBlog for example do reportedly implement it. The fly in the ointment is the inertia of installed software: how to know if any given installation you're interacting with implements it or not.
It's not reasonable to expect the user to know, and do we want them to find out by trial and error?

It's a tough one, and if anyone has any good ideas on the subject please feel free to contact me and let me know.

Expression Web and Blend to be included in MSDN Premium subscription

Excellent news this morning from Somasegar.

Thanks to the Microsoft Expression blog for the heads up.

Now I just have to bite my nails for a while hoping Expression Blend is released before my MSDN subscription expires...

Diarist 2 for Pocket PC released

(UPDATE 07/04/2007: Another refresh. This time thanks go to Stefan Stranger for noticing that nothing was happening when adding a blog where it was selected from a list of several hosted on the same site. When I checked I found the event handler had got unhooked at some stage. So embarrassing.)

(UPDATE 04/04/2007:The version I posted last night did not handle VGA displays correctly, as Juan Gomez alerted me this morning. I've now posted an updated version of the CAB file)

This version is updated for (and requires) .NET Compact Framework 2.

Unfortunately I've had to drop Blogger  support (I think I've warned everybody enough about that now), but there is a nice collection of new features.

Read more about it here, or just go to my web site to download it.

Or alternatively of course, you could just do something else completely. It's entirely up to you, I won't mind.

Now I can put some serious time into WPF and other nifty things.