Drew's Blog

Don Sings The Praises of InfoPath

... I wish I could say that the product stuff I'm working on is what blew him away, but alas, all of my mondo-cool XML and Web Service plumbing hacks were dwarfed by a little development tool that ships in just a few months.

I used that tool to write the app I'm using right now to write this blog entry. I rewrote the app for Clemens - it took about 2 minutes to take an XML Schema for my blog data to get the app fully functional. ...

[Don Box's Spoutlet]

InfoPath is definitely one product I'm looking forward to. Don reveals that InfoPath is indeed the product he's using to post to his weblog.

Comment Or Post A Response On Your Own Weblog?

There's always a dilemma about whether you should add a comment on someone's site or write your own blog entry. I guess pingback and trackback try to work towards solving some of these issues [apologies for not being sophisticated enough to be using either of them ;o)]. I know some people publish RSS feeds for their comments too. [Adrian Bateman (VisionTech) ]

I personally, have been making less comments and now relying a little more on the PingBacks and TrackBacks. I guess I would reserve the comments for items I do not wish to have in my blog or for people out there with out a blog (who are you people anyway). [ScottW's ASP.NET Weblog]

+1. I use comments when it's not something I feel I need to voice an opinion about on my own weblog.

The Pingback and Trackback specifications totally took weblogging to the next level. They connect weblogs in an automated way making it easier to share our thoughts and ideas. Bravo to both specifications and I look forward to seeing more support for them in future weblogging software implementations.

Don's Mystery Blogging Client

I have a new blog front end ...and it isn't browser based or winforms based. [Don Box's Spoutlet]

Hmmm... I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess Don has taken the step the rest of us would love to take and that's hooking OneNote  up to some sort of posting macro written using VS.NET Tools For Office.

Guess I'll have to wait and see if I'm right. :)

RE: SOAP Blogging API

Don Box has a new weblog home . Meanwhile, it looks like he and ChrisAn are conspiring on a new SOAP based blogger API . My hope (and expectations, given that Don and I chatted on this) is that what emerges is an API that involves literally sending RSS items. Something along the lines of what I outlined in the Evolution of the Weblog APIs . [Sam Ruby]

Yeah, I mused about this once also. I even talked about it a bit on the bloggerDev list at one point, trying to stir up some thoughts on it. Unfortunately that list is pretty dead, so there wasn't much discussion going on.

FWIW, I totally agree with Sam. A SOAP based API wouldn't need to be anything too fancy and should really take a doc literal approach where the data returned pertaining to posts is based around the RSS 2.0 spec. You could embed implementation specific details into the RSS document as long as your custom elements/attributes are namespace prefixed, which should be no problem.

As far as the login parameters that are part of the current blogger API declarations, those should be factored out of the individual APIs and instead be handled as SOAP headers with the server deciding which kind of security specs it wants to support. There can of course be a simple default security spec drafted up, but more advanced implementations might want to support richer forms of security.

Doing Away With Button Images Thanks to CSS

Dylan Greene did the button in CSS , which is precisely as politically correct as the PNG version. [Scripting News]

This is great! Surprised no one thought of this sooner. 

In fact, here's a translation of the instance CSS to a class so that you can stuff it in a stylesheet and reuse it for all types of buttons in your page:

a.standardsButton
{
    border:1px solid;
    border-color:#ffc8a4 #7d3302 #3f1a01 #ff9a57;
    padding:0px 3px 0px 3px;
    font:bold 10px verdana,sans-serif;
    color:#FFFFFF; background-color:#ff6600;
    text-decoration:none;
    margin:0px;
}

Then, you can use something like so:

Don Box Goes Dynamic With His Weblog

Don's no longer inhibited by lack of write access! [Don Box's Spoutlet]

Apparently Don has been able to sweet talk himself into dynamic publishing with the GotDotNet administrators. Hopefully we'll hear from him more often now. :)

Make sure to update your bookmarks and RSS subscriptions!

Using Delegates Asynchronusly

There's a new article up on O'Reilly today written by Richard Blewitt entitled Using Delegates Asynchronusly . In it Richard gives a great overview of delegates and then goes on to cover the specific task of invoking them asynchronusly. Richard even touches on something that has been a hot topic lately over on the DOTNET discussion lists, which is that, as of .NET 1.1, there have been documentation changes that specify that using delegates in a "fire-and-forget" fashion (i.e. calling BeginInvoke w/out calling EndInvoke) could result in a runtime resource leak.

Overall, a great article for anyone who wants to understand what makes delegates tick.

ThreeDegrees Beta Now Available

Following up on last week's posting, the ThreeDegrees software is now available in beta form. I just finished the product tour and am dl'ing as we speak. Looks pretty cool/fun, but I don't know if it's going to be revolutionary.

XML-RPC.NET 0.8.0 Released

I released version 0.8.0 of XML-RPC.NET last night. It contains support for optional struct members but the FAQ documentation is... [Cook Computing]

Charles has rolled out yet another update to one of, if not the, best XML-RPC libraries for .NET. You can get all the juicy details about this release here.

If you have to work with XML-RPC based services, this is one set of components you should lock into your toolbelt.

ASPWeblogs/.NETWeblogs Software Update

The Blogs are now all running on Beta 2.5. Those of you blogging here should be getting an email shortly with what has changed and where you can get the updated winform app. [ScottW's ASP.NET WebLog]

Scott has rolled out another update to his .NET based weblogging software which he so kindly let's us all beta test for him. The biggest addition this time is that he's added pingback and trackback functionality. He's also added weblogs.com pinging and changed the calendaring to be monthly (which is much better IMHO).

Thanks and keep up the great work Scott!