Only fixes will be applied to the current state to get the next final. Screenshots to view: one, two, three. Here are som Highlights:

• new GUI version dev. reach the current dev. state of V1.0d
• Autodiscovery of Feeds (sensitive to current displayed web page)
• Hierarchical categories
• new Application property dialog (have a look there and test all the new stuff)
• extended One-Click feed subscription within Bandit window (now listen to:
  • AmphetaDesk (Wildgrape Newsdesk)
  • Userland
  • BottomFeeder
  • Headline Viewer
  • nntp//rss
• Shift-Click a link opens separate window
• Ctrl-Click a link opens a separate tab
• Posting Comments (CommentAPI support)
• Customizable Feed Item display formatting via .xslt stylesheets

Who want's to test please download here: RSSBandit_1.1.beta1.zip Any feedback is welcome to get the final a more stable version.

Nice ideas on RSS found here. Get inspired on "item posts by day" grouping and added to my TODO RSS Bandit feature list.

Just a reminder: I should have a look to managed wrapper for BITS, thanks to Chris.

Syndirella dev. seems to be over. I had the same feeling as SharpReader and Harvester appeared on the horizon. But hey: giving up because coding goes out of fun and will be real hard work? Should not be a problem if the product succeeds. Just make the features a bit better and the product more stable and all folks will love you

Sam is really a source of ideas related to RSS. Many of my own thoughts regain on his blog, so I do not have to scribble down all the stuff again just read the blog again. Hints about the BCL type names are important to me if I have to design own components:

[CLSCompliantAttribute(true)]
public class XXY ...

The CLSCompliant should be one of my defaults. Anyone knows about a c# compiler switch to check this without the attribute?

The seminar "Making sense of Windows Installer" gave me really somewhat! Now I really know what all the GUID's are for. Thanks again to Sophie T. from InstallShield!

Sorry to all folks that have requested the Bandit 1.1 alpha screenshots yesterday. My hoster goes down at 11:28 AM on an Bandwidth Limit. Dare Obasanjo's story links to me that raises my hit counter immediatly. Nice to have them all here, and then brinkster shot back. I have moved the images to an alternate location to workaround the limit. Look here:

• Shot 1
• Shot 2
• Shot 3
• Shot 4

Monday, 7. April I'm out of office for an seminar at Ulm (offline).

Upgraded to BWXML 1.1 and changed the css to get a more compact design. The Brinkster (my host) own problem with upload of .asp pages with On Error Resume Next (not paired with On Error goto 0) statements is considerable frustrating. The rss.xml feed is now of version 2.0.

Hey, nice: BlogX moves to GotDotNet. Welcome!

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?