Today I stumbled over this issue with the Visual Studio 7 Forms Designer:

 "The class Main can be designed, but is not the first class in the file.  Visual Studio requires that designers use the first class in the file.  Move the class code so that it is the first class in the file and try loading the designer again."

Here is the sample code:

namespace Test
{
 public class MyEventArgs {
  public string Param1;
  public bool Param2;
 }
 /// <summary>
 /// Summary description for Main Form.
 /// </summary>
 public class Main : System.Windows.Forms.Form
 {
 }
}

So: avoid this by using separate files for each class if possible or keep at least the forms class code alone.

Now also our public RSS Bandit forums at http://www.rssbandit.org/forum has feeds: http://www.rssbandit.org/forum/rss.asp (returns top 25 recently posted topics). You can have a look to the rss content to get infos about how to limit postings or subscribe to a special subsection.

And: today I found I can also read feeds from my local living region: http://www.szon.de/xml/rss_info/?SZONSID=7831f2ef8071d0bee0cef8ff4ecf284c (Schwäbische Zeitung, local news).

Was nice to watch and see my Rss Bandit coworker alive

if (System.Runtime.Version.Major == 1 && 
    System.Runtime.Version.Minor < 1 ) {...} else {...}

Isn't this (and variations) enough to have:

if (Environment.OSVersion.Major == 5 && 
    Environment.OSVersion.Minor >= 1 ) {...} else {...}

There are really enough differences we have to consider... :-(

Hey, partitially good news: my local RssBandit beat build 109 does not fail anymore on Sam's test feed, if it is compiled with .NET 1.0: http://intertwingly.net/stories/2004/01/12/broken.rss. It display the Not so smart quotes post with content Postels law. But IE and also the validator still fails and complain about:

The XML page cannot be displayed

Cannot view XML input using XSL style sheet. Please correct the error and then click the Refresh button, or try again later.

---

An invalid character was found in text content. Error processing resource 'http://intertwingly.net/stories/2004/01/12/broke...

      <description>Postel

Sorry

This feed does not validate.

line 15, column 25: XML Parsing error: <unknown>:15:25: not well-formed (invalid token) [help]
      <description>Postel’s law</description>
                        ^

Looks like, we "simply gathering the data" now...

But note: if I compile against .NET 1.1, it fails parsing on invalid character in the given enconding. 
So .NET 1.0 uses a more lazy XML implementation? 

Should we switch back to just "gather the data"?

I recently refreshed the beta bits because of some more fixed bugs and to enable testing of the newly added UI languages portuguese (bras.) and polish.

Yesteray we visited the island Mainau, Lake of Constance. Yes, we live at the lake, but it isn't just a trip of 10 minutes: a hour by car followed by a 20 minutes cruise. But the childs really like it! It has a huge playground, wild and animals to stroke, pony riding, a house full of exotic butterflys, last but not least: nice flowers bushes and trees from all over the world. And at that moment it does not have too much tourists Overall: nice weather and a nice restful day.

Which OS are You?

And the the migratory birds return. But what do they do in the meantime?!

Very busy the last days: spent time with my family on easter, finished the work to prepare our product for the chinese market and prepared my car for the summer time (spring finery).

That TeXML: an XML vocabulary for TeX sounds cool: now somebody can write a Word-XML/OpenOffice-XML to TeXML to TeX converter with the help of XSLT only. The power of XML spreads the world...

Rss Bandit UI translation goes on: now we have russian, chinese (simplified) and german 100% done! Thanks to Oleg, Ryan Ma for their work!

Inspired by Stuart Hamilton's post I got my first time practice today with Mozilla XUL extension programming: hacked together a working extension for firefox to enable right-click subscription of feeds. The context menu extension for Internet Explorer is already implemented and will be available with the next Rss Bandit release.

These extensions work the same way: if you have a default feed: Uri scheme handler registered, this handler will get called via the extensions. So it should work not only with Rss Bandit, but also with SharpReader, NewsGator and other popular aggregators that support the feed: Uri scheme!
Here are some screenshots:

• Internet Explorer
• Firefox (tested with Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8)

Peace!

Update: the link to the extension should now work...

So you should surf the net more careful today. Some special news:

• Archäologische Sensation: Geheimnis der Spinx von Gizeh enthüllt [schockwellenreiter]
• Keine Scherze: Punkte fürs Telefonieren und Falschparken, Zur Kasse, Bürger [stern.de]
• ByteTorrent, 800% faster than BitTorrent [Don Park]
• Ben found some [Ben Hammersley's Dangerous Precedent]

Read this article about the serious origins of April Fool's Day. 

Last saturday we invented customers and partners to our every year PROCOS AG ski event in Lenzerheide, Valbella (Switzerland):

Click the image for some nice pictures of the event. For me as a "Lowlander" it was a amazing day: I'm a skier for just one year now and thought I'm well prepared (had a class last year), but that wasn't the case: not accustomed such long descents. And so the next day was mainly for relaxing and sleeping...

But overall: a very nice day! Thanks to all my colleges, the custumers and partners for sharing.

In response to Dare Obasanjo's post announcing the beta phase of Rss Bandit I setup a poll to make or decision for a new name (replacement to RSS Bandit) a little bit easier:

Vote for your favorite name!

So go on and vote, please!

What to write about blank? An empty post? Nope. Today I want to ask a simple question: why does Windows starts always Internet Explorer if you provide the pseudo-url about:blank on the command line? At least one user complains about that in Rss Bandit. I used the following line of code to start the configured default browser:

Process.Start(url);

That works fine as long we have a valid url unequal to about:blank. I'd never configured my default browser over Setup Program Access and Defaults, thought it is not needed because the browsers detect that state by itself. And it seems, some of the web browsers does not handle it well: configuring Firefox over it's options only as the default browser seems to be not enough. IE gets called for about:blank. Switching via Setup Program Access and Defaults does it well: Firefox get's called also for about:blank. What is the save way to handle such cases? A user expects if he says open url in default browser to get it opened in the correct browser, also if it is a empty blank page. So I really have to read/deal again with the registry? The hive HKLM\SOFTWARE\Clients\StartMenuInternet seems to play the role to store the settings of dialog Setup Program Access and Defaults. No other way around this?