Back from vacations today I found the article Shell Extensions for .NET Assemblies at codeproject.com: really useful tool (must have) to get our projects organized (old VB6 stuff vs. newer .NET stuff). It visually distinguish between normal windows DLL's and .NET assemblies and shows if the assembly is signed via a public key token column.

Dare Obasanjo, you are not as old as you feel now (remember our chat) :) compared to myself. Hopefully you will be part of the project as long as it lives.

is: Mother's Day:

The Canon PhotoStitch software isn't quite good enough (you may notice the shadow stripes where the images stitches together) but you should get the idea.

Yesterday it was raining the whole day, but we had a nice birthday party anyway - Maike is now 7 years old (young?). Unpleasant it is only that the Digital Dance Revolution did not arrive yet from the US, but the kids also had much fun without it...

Simple Single Sign-On [Sam Ruby]

Today there was a flood of fixed isses (12) for .NET 1.1 published via the Most Recent KB for MS .NET Framework 1.1 article feed. Some that that may affect me at work are

• FIX: Memory and resources are not released when you call the Form.Close method on child MDI forms on a computer that has the .NET Framework 1.1 or the .NET Framework 1.1 with SP1 installed
• One that may affect me with my next generation laptop is this -- But serious on servers!
• FIX: You may receive an error message when you open a (inherited) form in Design view in Visual Studio .NET

Is there any deadline known for SP2?

I wished I would have earlier experienced that a conference like Les Blogs takes place. So for now I only can read the short review Les Blogs: "Profi-Sex ist auch nicht besser als Amateur-Sex" [german, heise.de] or Vive le Blogs [wired news] (covered to late).

France is for now the number two in the blog world (overall count of web logs, "...half of all schoolchildren are bloggers..."): so I'm happy we are able to support also a french transation of my favorite RSS Reader:

"The French have a long tradition of speaking loudly," said Loïc Le Meur, a Frenchman and Six Apart's European vice president. "We are the people who made the French Revolution, (the national uprising of) May '68 -- and just look at all our strikes! We always want to debate. Perhaps blogs are the ultimate tool for us to express ourselves."

Somehow technorati requires to get a link somewhere on my blog, to claim it. So here it is: my my technorati profile.

There are much positive responses meanwhile about the Bandit 1.3 version, much more than we get back for version 1.2. And it spreads the web:

• donwload.com
• Chip Online (de)
• heise.de/ct
• PC tipp (de-ch)
• About Email
• Version Tracker

Also mentioned at various sites offering feeds, e.g. some uncommon Bad Vilbeler Golfclub Lindenhof e.V or Deutsche Bundesbank (did not even know they offer feeds!)

Very often they have the problem to find a good equivalent term/translation to a specific english one. There are allready good sources that may help like wikipedia.org, or simple online translation services like BabelFish. But often the language needed isn't supported there, or the required term. Now google offers a good extension to all the services: define:'s [via google blog]. So you can find out e.g. for RSS also some non-geek definitions (like 'Repetitive stress syndrome').

 You can find a list of features/bugfixes on Dare Obasanjo's site. I added also the source package that includes also my experiments with the service plugin layer and the spam blocker example.

Just to say: a very big thank you to all the contributors supported us with the translations! Some of the offerings are postponed for different reasons, but we hope to get it done/included soon within a follow up release.

Sadly we did not receive so good support for completely new icons and application images... .-(

There are some postings here and there that indicates: the advertising companies (e.g. feedburner.com) now have also an eye to RSS feeds. There are some serious people who like to measure the requests of each single feed post and/or produce some income to lower their hosting costs. Others don't like to see such ads in their subscriptions. So I experimented today a bit to provide a channel processing infrastructure enabling assemblies to plug into the processing chain of RSS Bandit. Now it works all together and my first plug-in is...

You are right: an ads blocker:

RSS Bandit Ads-Blocking via NewsChannelServices" height=522 alt="RSS Bandit Ads-Blocking via NewsChannelServices" src="http://www.rendelmann.info/blog/content/binary/Ads-Blocking%20via%20NewsChannelServices.gif" width=664 border=0>

It is still a simple example but easy to extend with a blacklist loaded from a file or other things. The major improvement is the new channel plug-in infrastructure. Some things I have to discuss with Dare Obasanjo and Phil but if we get an agreement, it will maybe included in the next release of RSS Bandit (Wolverine). So what can you do with it? Examples:

• Saves feed content in a MySQL database as it arrives
• Monitors one or more URL's and notifies you when the web page(s) have changed
• Content manipulation like the ads blocker above
• ...

Stay tuned!

Yes, we will get it done for the next month! As Dare Obasanjo mentioned: we are still looking for language contributors and proof readers. For the available and planned languages please have a look to our supported language matrix. If your preferred or native language isn't listed there or a proof reader is not yet mentioned, feel free to contact us or comment here.