March 2003 - Posts

• SpringBreak != WorkBreak

  I decided it was a sad fact that the last spring break of my college career is coming up and I was viewing it as a chance to catch up on projects.  So, I let my girlfriend talk me into going on a spring break trip.  The plan right now is to go to New Orleans (assuming we can find a reasonable place to stay), and all my projects are put on hold until after the trip. Hopefully I just have a few more hours on my RSS Library, and I can release it pretty soon after I get back.  The library should allow for building RSS aggregators with just a few lines of code.  I already have my personal aggregator running on it, but it needs a few things lik OPML support, still.  I'm also putting my Microsoft Student Developer competition entry on hold until I get back.  I'm on a limited deadline so I'd like to get some more work done on it soon...  Looks like I might be taking my laptop... Posted Mar 19 2003, 01:21 PM by mihalik with 1 comment(s)

• Creating a HTML Viewer Control

  I wrote up a quick set of instructions for creating a UserControl from the Web Browser Control that makes it much easier to display HTML on a Windows Form.  I initially got the idea from Kirk's Blog.  I'm working on my writing skills to write some articles on some more interesting topics, but this is a quick step-by-step that I threw together in the last few minutes.  Check it out if you are interested in that sort of thing.  Bonus for people who check it out:  Screenshot of browsing the web in the Windows Forms Designer.   Posted Mar 10 2003, 11:53 PM by mihalik with no comments

• .NET RSS Aggregators

  Well, it's my first blog post ever.  I plan on getting an "about me" page up in a few days but I felt like jumping in head first tonight.  Don Box mentioned an article on MSDN about creating your own RSS aggregator.  A couple people mentioned they would like to see an increase in .NET based aggregators.  I'm not sure if this article is a good place to start.  When I was working on my own aggregator, I found myself spending all my time writing code for parsing the XML, serializeing to disk, and keeping track of read/unread messages.  This article covers a bit of that information but the code for the application is not very modular and would be hard to implement in your own application. I think a good RSS library for .NET could really increase it's use in aggregators.  Hopefully there will be a library releleased here.  You can actually "borrow" the dll from his Beaver aggregator (nice .NET based aggregator even though it's v0.4.3) and reference it in your own applications.  But it would be nice to have some samples and support. Anyone else know of a good RSS library for .NET?  Posted Mar 03 2003, 01:31 AM by mihalik with 4 comment(s) Filed under: .NET