Found on Tim Ewald's Spoutlet: MSDN finally has official RSS feeds! And: "... We have big plans for using RSS going forward!". Sounds like a Bandit Clone will be a official Office product soon... (May be not a joke)

For all people that want to know about and test the alpha preview state of Bandit GUI development, here are some screen shots:

• Shot 1
• Shot 2
• Shot 3
• Shot 4

Who wants also to test a executable, please mail and I will provide a download link.

Following the discussion (Sam, BlogWorks,...) about how to implement CommentAPI, what (SOAP or XMLRPC) and why, trackback mechanisms, ping back etc. my feeling is that the overall direction will be somewhat like a NNTP network for RSS. All the blogs are simple small NNTP servers that "listens" each other (aka ping back) and provide the feed consumers with the posts (aka rss.xml), who has answered on it's own blog (aka trackback) and who has posted a direct comment. So why they all does not agree to the well proofed NNTP protocol (or similar in SOAP) as the basic and extend it by the RSS spec? Why they all start in the beginning? And each one try to make his solution the best over all and: a bit different than all the others. To be compatible now he starts to implement interface XYZ, because it is yet there and seems to be popular. Next, he also implement YZX... It really looks like that there should be a kind of agreement (may be handled by W3C). This would make the frontend programmers more happy ::no one need two tools that handles RSS (reading, posting):: and all the backend's interoperable.

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.