Interesting and a must have for RssComponents: XHTML in the body. Sam seems to develope a syndirella clone that supports blog posting, so the result may be a similar tool like OExpress/NNTP but for RSS. Should have a closer look how they incorporate comments and trackback mechanisms.

Chris Hollander was busy tonight. I think he should be a member of our RSS Bandit workspace so the wheel is not invented again.

Yesterday it took me several hours to figure out how to get XslTransform work with output-escaping. I had thought, it should not be a problem to implement it based on my experiences with our intranet app. It uses .asp to get some xml from a BL Layer and transform it using the MSXML Parser and some xslt. There I can transform a DOM and get back a DOM and output-escaping is not a problem. Now moved it up to .NET XslTransform it does not work this way. Thanks to Prajakta Joshi [@microsoft.com] 's post I have learned to use a Stream as output, then read the stream back with StreamReader to get the string I need. Has that to be?

I had today on the early morning a dentist date. I was naturally already completely dissolved for yesterday evening...
And then nothing at all happened: only preparations for my new tooth crown. Bandit today: tray icon stuff done, hot-key support etc. Local search feature (and feedster/google support would be nice.

Added today a cool feature to RSS Bandit: subscribe to feed(s) that should go to local installed Userland or AmphetaDesk applications. So a user can just click on these icons and get the "Add New Feed" dialog to provide the title and categoy, and press ok. A few more things (bugs, bad behaviors) are fixed now. Still missing: tray icon and "navigate to next unreaded feed item"... Joe Gregorio talks about the Comment API. This together with the trackback feature would match my idea of a a threaded view of feed items. Still listening what's going on there...

SourceForge.net makes it easier to stay up-to-date. Hey, they are riding on the wave while GotDotNet is swimming :-( A slashcode article points me to extend my page templates by a line of code to support weblog aggregation tools. Last but not least: that's my first post using w.bloggar.

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.