From Don Box's Spoutlet: tweak VS.NET shell integration. BTW: such magic should be found within the documentation. So it just provide another story for books named "The 1001 secrets of VS.NET".

Dare Obasanjo seems to be very busy, so I have decided to provide (may be last beta) bits of RSS Bandit 1.1 Beta 4. As usual: the old links are still valid but contain beta 4 bits. There are only few bug fixes and better support for own extended stylesheet authoring (aka RSS Item formatting). Have a look to the templates readme file. The RC will then contain support for AutoUpdate and be available as soon Dare Obasanjo has finished testing the bits with the GotDotNet team (thanks folks!) providing the backend service.

Don Park ideas about a newspaper GUI found here and here are point two on my TODO list for RSS Bandit. I would be pleased to be allowed to welcome Don as a member of the team! It seems he has already done the first steps implementing it.

coral aka Crystal Flame writes about opinionated linking. That sounds very interesting and perhaps get supported by feedster.
But how about a special opinion namespace on xhtml:

<a xmlns:my="http://semantic.web/link/opinions" class="positive" my:opinion="positive">positive link target</a>

...and the spider/aggregators life will be much easier.

Everything familar with MSXML3 and transformations know about a "feature" of the : it cannot output something without escaping. And the story goes on for .NET. If you have to produce html with xml transform you have a big problem: you get a correcly url formatted link within the xml source that you have to write to an <A>element as the href attribute. How about "&" signs in the url? They are escaped with "&" which result in wrong formatted url's. The normal way you can use to write element content to html output without escaping:

<xsl:value-of select="urlElement" disable-output-escaping="yes"></xsl:value-of>

Now the non-working version to write a valid <A> element:

<A><xsl:attribute name="href"><xsl:value-of select="urlElement" disable-output-escaping="yes"/></xsl:attribute>Link</A>

And here is the code to work around (name it a hack):

<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">&lt;a href='</xsl:text><xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping='yes' select=url'/><xsl:text>'></xsl:text>Link Text<xsl:text disable-output-escaping='yes'>&lt;/a></xsl:text>

Adam Nathan clarifies the interop related GetLastError handling within managed code. It should be a part of my .NET documentation.

Sean McGrath:

This is so cool. Sit back and watch the world blog its way around the clock. Now you know you simply must get those geotags and that RSS autodiscovery machinery into your blog.

Adopted now.
Sam Gentile:

Rico is one of the smartest guys on the CLR team and he is super, super passionate about performance.  He is looking at everyway possible to make managed code run faster...   He just posted a great whitepaper on how the GC works and how to get the best perf possible out of your managed code... worth a read!

Where is the blog of this smart guy named Rico?
Sellsbrothers:

NAnt 0.8.2 was recently released. Note that this release has support for both the Microsoft.NET framework v1.1 and Mono.

Now it's time to dive in and setup our company build server. The NAnt user mailing list I'm subscribed to serves around ten mails a day, so all probems should be known by the dev team and probably fixed RSS on each sourceforge project rocks!

Adrian: had a problem to post this with w.bloggar 3.1: got error 1072896760 - "error parsing the xml passed to the server: rpcserver(1)". Don't know if it is related to Blogworks XML or the new w.bloggar release installed today.

Have a look to [Terminator 3] QT trailer, nice, pure action. Found at slashdot.

Which is the question, you would answer. But I do not mean: who produces Windows, but which humans puts behind. Who is interested in should read here.

Read Chris Heathcote's [anti-mega: RSS. Sucks.]. Agree to some points, no to others. At first: there is no software out in the world that really ALL users agree to and happy to use it. The better ones have a better implementation of the compromises and the problem is more general than related to RSS Aggregators only. Depends on what you expect to be solved by the SW: all what you want within one program, than it should be implemented by the OS, or - some tools that solve special problems or address different tasks to be done. The problem of each tool: it should integrate with all the others to get the result you want. A solution that just works out of the box is there for more than 20 years: UNIX and all the command line tools. They all work together by pipes and programmed by the shell. But: who really loves the command line? Other solutions still exists for GUI OS's: OpenStep (and may be MacOS X, but no hands on) and the Services concept: each program can offer services (specific tasks to be done), so a digital translator listen for marked words within a textbox and offer a translation service. The services interfaces are well documented and served by the underlaying framework, so it was easy to implement such integration. I think such more general (and easy to applied) approaches should be there on Windows and .NET than each tool implement a special plug-in interface of one other tool.

Far eastern: just tried [awasu] for about 5 minutes, the approach they use there is bit different than Bandit: the feed items are just bookmarks to the original blog page, categories not working but one the way. One feature that is jet also on my list: the summery view, and another one new to me: navigate to a feed item (configured for that feature) by the tray icon context menu. That's really nice. Think about to implement a variant with display new unread items. They have a nice website I recommend to view.

As I have posted, also the older links to beta 1 and 2 zipped files are now refreshed to contain beta 3.

The Beta 3 of RSS Bandit is now ready for further tests. Fixes: * move to next unread item now considers the feed item dates (oldest unread selected first) * now there is input validation on the proxy dialog * selecting multiple feed items to mark them unread does not mark the tree node bold * creating a new feed/category now selects the new node Improvements: * new entries within help menu: Bug report and display news * the "Post reply" command is also on the toolbar now * reordered main toolbar items * new "new browser tab" command on the browser toolbar * more intuitive web browsing: tabs display parts of the website title. * node items visualizes the unread items * sort order of the feed item listview is restored on re-populate These features should be tested (and feedback is welcome) because I do not have the posibilities to apply the tests by myself: !!! proxy stuff !!! on XP common controls 6 should be used now.

Simon, Dare Obasanjo, Sam and Chris had a discussion about Extensibility. In general it is good idea to have them. On a complete new design it is always nice to have a look to current existing solutions: that of the VS7 IDE itself (was not a big change from VS6) or more interesting that of SharpDevelop (uses the framework to program the framework). They use a combination of xml/native API (interfaces) that works very well: xml describes the plug-in/add-in while the add-in itself use native API to communicate. To get the ideas take a hour to examine the code. A nice plug-in for an RSS reader would be an editor/blog post program. Also: for an blog maintenance program like w.bloggar or BlogX it would be nice to have a reader plug-in. So what is the "master" application to workaround the hen egg problem?

I currently use a separate archive index page on my private blog. But as the archivelist is also available on the main blog page, it is not really needed. But it opens more flexibility to users that want only one link to the archive, not the whole list list itself on the main page to save layout space or have other more important links there. You should keep it supported. A separate template for archive pages would open to render them more specific to give better feedback to a visitor that he currently not display the newest item(s) and provide backlinks etc., nice to have. I would like to have the additional RSS tags available at edit time (and also the support within the templates). Also: to be able to provide a trackback URL I have to "fall back" to the web editor. Any extensions to w.bloggar are known to support categories/trackback ? [content related to...]

There is a real life.

First: there is a refreshed download version of the Bandit Beta 2 available. The Beta 1 download archive is also updated to Beta 2 to keep some external links valid. Warning: they all will be gone as soon the public release is out [here]. Fixed an important bug that pops up a exception box every 5 minutes because of an ConnectFailure. So for now it should really have [beta] state. [marcos], [codemonkey_uk]: yes it [rocks] thanks. Your suggestions are welcome and considered in one of the next public releases. All these small issues really takes (design-)time and as long Bandit is a leisure time job and with our deadline for the current final version we focus currently on fixing important bugs. [Microsoft UI's -- Why is it?] Good question. My experiences on windows programming (COM) with the most popular RAD tool in the last years: the same story goes on with .NET -- purchase the third party GUI components you like to use. For our example public project we didn't have an option to do so, therefore we use other public components like MagicLibrary.

[A Proud American] that is proud to use mozilla: yes, same thoughts. Just replace the feeds tree with a favorites tree, hide the feed detail tab and "tadaa": the tabbed IE with an option to open separate windows is reality.