August 2003 - Posts
There's a new version NewzCrawler Beta. I did not found a 'what's new' page, so these are the features I found:
It has some new cool features, mostly to catch-up with other aggregators:
- Support for 'Now Playing' in WMP and WinAmp
- Supports [xhtml:body], so I can read Don Box's posts without opening a new window ;)
- Emailing posts
- Unicode support
- It has the UI ready for adding comments to weblogs posts but the feature is still not working.
- The ability to read the next/previous post with Alt+Up and Alt+Down
- Gzip encoding support
I did try other aggregators, but I keep going back to Newzcrawler, even if it still does not support HTTPS :(.
I needed to parse a .csproj file (the C# Visual Studio .NET project file) and add a few references to some assemblies in our nant/nunit test suite.
The obvious way of doing it is to use a DOM and add a node, etc.
The cool and the lazy programmer's way of doing it is using a DataSet:
DataSet ds = new DataSet();
ds.ReadXml("project.csproj");
ds.Tables["Reference"].Rows.Add(new object[] {"System.XML", "System.Xml", ds.Tables["References"].Rows[0][0]});
ds.WriteXml("project.csproj");
You can also write an XSD for the DataSet (ds.WriteXmlSchema("csproj.xsd")), add the XSD to your VS.NET solution, and generate a typed DataSet for it.
By the way, I tried the same approach to save an RSS file, and the problem is that I found no way to add attributes to the DataSet's root node, so I get something like:
<rss>
</rss>
instead of:
<rss version="2.0">
</rss>
I confess that I never thought I would need a C# to VB.NET converter, but today after coding some sample app for a customer in C#, he said 'mmm I wanted it in VB.NET, can you convert it'?
As I'm a lazy programmer, I went to my Dave's Quick Search Bar, typed "c# to vb converter" and I got http://www.aspalliance.com/aldotnet/examples/translate.aspx as the first hit in google.
It worked like a charm.
I'll be there too.
On Friday, I met Diego Gonzalez (yes, you need Passport to login ;), from Lagash (in spanish). He is one of the guys writing the MS Application Blocks.
He is a really smart guy, and has some wicked-cool .net code in his laptop, like a java -> net interop tool he wrote for one customer, or a object-relational mapper (a 'one month project' ;).
He was quite proud of the User Interface Process Application Block, so I'll have to take a closer look at it. He was also guilty for the Data Access Application Block dataset bug ;), and he was feeling terribly about it. They had 1500 unit tests for it, but they missed a simple one...
I tried to convince him to join the Blogsphere... I hope he will!
Novell acquires Ximian
This is quite interesting. It's a smart move from Novell, as they need to get some developer mind share. I hope they don't screw it!
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