The new GUI project goes on. Now the most of the dialogs and tasks are working like the original first GUI implementation. Tray Icon is still missing, but I want to create a nice animation at first, then implement it. Someone interested in a native language GUI, like german?

For all people that want to know about the current state of Bandit GUI development, here are two screen shots:

• shot 1
• shot 2

Sorry for the slow progress, but my spare time is not as much as I really need to be as fast as I have noted on the message board. I have promised to go skiing with my two children (4 and 6 years) tomorrow morning. Then I go on working on...

I am really unhappy about the heaviness of implementing the model-view-controller (MVC) concept on an .NET GUI application. Is the only reason to have a application class on top of the Application.Run() and that starts the GUI to setup the global exception handler? If I modify the definitions within the GUI designer code region to get the tool and menu buttons implements a ICommands (the pattern) interface, I get stack overflow errors on closing the designer of my modified form. Ok, there is a comment to NOT do so, but how I should apply this? Ok, I can write a library project that encapsulates the tools and buttons as GUI components and then I can drag and drop it to my form to work around this limitation. So I made it by hand (oh my good)... Now I think about throw away the most of my work and keep the GUI Form class as big as it will be by implememting all of the stuff by itself. As my experiences with VB6 showed: this is usually not the best way to go.

Read about some feedback of the RSS Bandit project on kuro5hin by Carage4Life. It is amazing to hear opinions of other people about an example code, that just works. I really like this kind of publicity. So I have enough pressure to make my voluntary work as best as possible I cannot agree to the GUI sucks comment made by marcos: he should read the whole stuff. And: the RSS Bandit article focus on the backend, how to use the .NET infrastructure to make such things work and not about how to write the best GUI ever seen in the world. That's it: provide some widgets to start the real work. My intention to involve myself was to just provide the result of my extensions (that can even solved better) that I want to the community and make RSS Bandit more a small, handy and nice tool to use for every day reading feeds. There is always a kind of fun factor writing GUI code, but the important things happen behind the scenes. So the backend drives the frontend and not vise versa. That's like bridle the horse from the rear.

Kuro5hin points to this essay written by Terry Jones of Monty Python fame about George W. Bush's warlike tendencies. What a great war humor and commentary...

Don points to this great book excerpt of Keth Brown. I'm happy to say: I already know about this article, it was jet published (in german) by DOTNET.PRO issue 03/2003 (current issue, so the link will point to the wrong issue after they publish a new one).
Unhappy: my current developer machine isn't setup as suggested. But for me moving to the new world of .NET Development does also mean: moving the right way. So I will adopt the Developer Lifestyle soon.

The guys at GotDotNet cry out: Congratulations! You have been approved to participate in RSS Bandit Workspace". Thanks i.A., I feel honoured
That opens the door to write the tool that I really want and I axactly know what it does. Let's start.

Looking around the last week at some available feed reader clients, I have found my personal favorite: FeedReader. Really handy tool. At first my favorite was NewsGator as I have outlook always open/running and the integration of the tool works well. But you have to invest some money (avowed: only a few $) and you cannot structure the feeds, that's important if you don't read only a handful feeds. Also looked over the NewsMonster, but it's really like it's name: a monster. At first, NS7 starts (10 sec's on my Latitude CPx H500GT ~497 Mhz), refreshing the feeds with the monster takes another 15 sec's startup of the java WebStart app and needs overall around 80 MByte RAM (20 NS7 / 60 the java app). Scott suggests another reader: NewzCrawler. Just like FeedReader, but a bit of overkill for my needs and I have to spent some $ again. Very interesting things happen on .NET: RSS Bandit, or some other tools addressing the handling of own blogs, like that Outblog (Exchange involved), or BlogX. Awaiting the moment to switch my own blog (together with the provider) to a .NET app...

"Don opens the kimono and plays Morpheus for Clemens' Neo". Would be good other (non-MS) guys are also be more involved than got a screen shot about a product that changes the name every month to be more excited... Blogx IS very interesting, looked over the sources and thinking about an outlook integration to have more powerfull frontend for writing posts. May be I can glue together the amazing tool or parts of from Ingo and blogx.