Brenton House

5 Reasons to why you are losing your RSS Subscribers

JohnTP has an article on the 5 reasons you are losing your RSS Subscribers.
Oh, wait.  Number 2 is Re-Blogging.  Damn it!  There goes another reader.  (bye mom!)

1. Infrequent Posting

   If you suddenly stop posting for a while and then post only with apologies for not posting, it’s a sure way to lose subscribers. If what you post is worthwhile and valuable, your readers won’t mind infrequent posting, but when you do post remember to not post apologies.

   If you really must apologize to your readers, do it at the end of a valuable post.

2. Re-Blogging

   If your blog only consists of copy-paste work from other blogs, then you are encouraging your readers to click the “unsubscribe” button. Re-blogging is one thing you must stay away from. If you are doing it now, stop it before you learn the hard way.

3. Constant Negativity

   I have seen a few people blog when in a bad mood. They post irrelevant to the content of their blogs. While this is ok when done rarely, you can lose subscribers when done often.Think twice about posting if you are in a bad mood, depressed or have nothing to say.

4. Treating your readers like idiots

   Talking down to your audience and treating them like idiots will send them right to the “unsubscribe” button. Prevent such posts in your blog.

5. Bad Titles

   Subscribers must be able to make out what you have posted from the title itself as most of them jugde whether to read the post or not from it. The post title must be a very short sumary of your post.

Microsoft Releases CodePlex Beta

Microsoft has released CodePlex Beta which is kind of like Sourceforge on top of Team Foundation Server.  You can create a project to be hosted on CodePlex, or download the software and run it on your own machine. 

Some of the projects hosted on CodePlex right now include:

• “Atlas” Control Toolkit
• CodePlex
• Commerce Starter Kit
• Connected Government Framework
• IronPython
• MSBuild Extras – Toolkit for .NET 1.1 “MSBee”
• Team Foundation Server Administration Tool
• Turtle – Open source client for Visual Studio Team System

The description on the project website is:

CodePlex is an online software development environment for open and shared source developers to create, host and manage projects throughout the project lifecycle. It has been written from the ground up in C# using .NET 2.0 technology with Team Foundation Server on the back end. CodePlex is open to the public free of charge.

CodePlex includes the following features:

• Release Management
• Work Item Tracking
• Source Code Dissemination
• Wiki-based Project Team Communications
• Project Forums
• News Feed Aggregation

VS 2005 Web Application Project 1.0 Released!!

The Visual Studio 2005 Web Application Project has been released!!

Don’t ask questions.  Just download and install it from here.  :)

<snip> 

The VS 2005 Web Application Project option provides an alternate web project model option to the VS 2005 Web Site Project Model that ships built-into VS 2005.  VS 2005 Web Application Projects support the same project, build and compilation semantics as the VS 2003 web project model.  Specifically:

• All files contained within the project are defined within a project file (as well as the assembly references and other project meta-data settings).  Files under the web’s file-system root that are not defined in the project file are not considered part of the web project.

• All code files within the project are compiled into a single assembly that is built and persisted in the \bin directory on each compile.  Incremental publishing of compiled apps is fully supported within the IDE (see this post for details).

• The compilation system uses a standard MSBuild based compilation process.  This can be extended and customized using MSBuild extensibility rules.  You can control the build through the property pages, name the output assembly or add pre- and post-build action rules.  It can also provide much faster compile times for large web projects.

Because the VS 2005 Web Application Project model has the same conceptual semantics as the VS 2003 Web Project Model, it also makes migrating VS 2003 web projects very, very easy – with zero/minimal code changes required.  To learn how to automatically upgrade a VS 2003 web project using this option, please review these VB and C# tutorials that walkthrough the VS 2003 to VS 2005 upgrade process step-by-step.

 

If you want to migrate an existing VS 2005 Web Site Project to be a VS 2005 Web Application Project, please also review these other VB and C# migration tutorials that walkthrough the Web Site to Web Application conversion process step-by-step.  This article here also describes some of the differences between the VS 2005 Web Site Project Model and VS 2005 Web Application Project Model.

 

Note that the VS 2005 Web Application Project option is available now as a free web download.  It will also be added built-in to VS 2005 SP1, and will be fully supported with Visual Studio releases going forward.

</snip>

Source for a C# compiler written in pure C#.

This is old news but I wanted to make sure that I keep a link to it.

Mike Stall wrote a C# compiler called “Blue” (download)  back in 2001.  Here are fast facts listed on his post:

- It’s written 100% in C#.

- It uses Reflection to import all references and Reflection.Emit to emit the IL.

- Everything (particularly the parser and lexer) were written by hand.

- It has the standard compiler pipeline as described in the dragon book.

- It produces verifiable IL (you can run PEVerify on the output and it passes).

Sharing my OPML

I have uploaded my OPML to Share.OPML.org. Looks like a pretty cool service and helpful in finding more feeds to eat up all my time.

What is the future of weblogs.asp.net?

There has been some conversations going on about the future of weblogs.asp.net.  Roy Osherove also has some feedback on a post about CS 2.0 upgrades on this site. A lot of us started blogging here back when it was DotNetWeblogs and it was the place for .NET bloggers to post.  Then it became weblogs.asp.net and there seems to be a push for this to be an ASP.NET blog site.  There has also been some delay in upgrading to Community Server 2.0, possibly coinciding with a rebranding of some kind.

I know a lot of bloggers have left to other places such as GeeksWithBlogs.com and CodeBetter.com.  But before I pack up and move, is there any official word from whoever is in charge of this site now as to its future direction?

What are some of the other DotNetWeblogs bloggers doing?  Staying put or finding a new home?

Visual Studio 2005 Web Application Project 1.0 to be release shortly

Scott Guthrie has let everyone know that Visual Studio 2005 Web Application Project 1.0 will be released soon.  It is very nice to have this back!  It will also be included in Visual Studio 2005 SP1 later this year.

Included are a few final improvements:

Martin Fowler updates his article on Continuous Integration

Martin Fowler has rewritten his Introduction to Continuous Integration article.

His original article was written several years ago and now has been completely rewritten. 

A must read for every developer!

Contents

• Building a Feature with Continuous Integration
• Practices of Continuous Integration
  • Maintain a Single Source Repository.
  • Automate the Build
  • Make Your Build Self-Testing
  • Everyone Commits Every Day
  • Every Commit Should Build the Mainline on an Integration Machine
  • Keep the Build Fast
  • Test in a Clone of the Production Environment
  • Make it Easy for Anyone to Get the Latest Executable
  • Everyone can see what's happening
  • Automate Deployment
• Benefits of Continuous Integration
• Introducing Continuous Integration
• Final Thoughts

Felice Pollano release first version of Deblector

Deblector is a debugging add-in for Lutz Roeder's Reflector.

Here is some info on usage from his site:

The zip file contains many dll, but to install the add-in the one to choose is DeblectorAddIn.dll, all the others must be in the same directory. To insert breakpoints the program must be paused. You can attach a running program, or open an executable with Reflector, select it, and press play. Note that the F5 short-key is not used to start the program because is already used by reflector itself, instead, you can use F7.