Patrick Steele's .NET Blog

OT: MP3 Player with CD Drive?

I picked up an MP3 player for my niece and noticed that it appears to come with it’s own CD drive!

I can’t wait to open it and see just how small it must be to fit in there! 

FTP classes in .NET 2.0

I had a chance to play around with the FTP classes in .NET 2.0 (FtpWebRequest and FtpWebResponse).  My initial impression (after about 15 or 20 minutes of coding) is, yuck — not very good.

First off, as Justin Rogers pointed out two years ago in the betas, they’ve wrapped a stateful protocol into the existing, stateless WebRequest model.  Very wierd design, in my opinion.  Second, the FtpWebRequest has a “Method” property that allows you to set the command you want to send to the FTP server.  There’s a bunch of predefined ones in the WebRequestMethods.Ftp class, but the documentation seems to imply you can enter whatever you want (its just a string).  Since I didn’t see a “CD” command in WebRequestMethods.Ftp I just hard-coded “cd /htdocs” in my test app.  BZZZZT!!  ArgumentException — This method is not supported.  Huh?  How the heck do I change to a different directory??!

After some googling I found this link from Mariya Atanasova’s blog on MSDN.  Wow.  That’s what I need to do to get to a different directory?  Ugly (IMHO).

Ok, since the FTP classes are new in 2.0 I’ll mark this down as a bad experience with the “first version”. 

FrazzledDad: We Have a Cover!

Jim Holmes says

FrazzledDad: We Have a Cover!.

One of the reasons my blogging diminished quite a bit (besides hunting for a job) was that I was asked by Jim Holmes to write an ILDASM article for the upcoming book he’s co-authoring with James Avery.  It seems a cover has been selected.  Very cool!  I had a great time writing the article and Jim Holmes was super-easy to work with.  Thanks for the opportunity!

Blogging with BlogJet

Ok, the usual, boring “just testing this” post.  I’ve used w.Bloggar in the past but I’ve seen a number of positive comments from people using BlogJet so I thought I’d give it a try (I never used .Text’s HTML interface for posting and the Community Server one doesn’t wow me either).  Seems a lot like w.Bloggar so far — although no “preview” window (which I kind of liked).  I know this is a WYSIWYG editor, but the styles come from the particular skin I use in CS so it’s not quite as WYSIWYG as I’d like.

I’ll play around some more and see if I can get BlogJet to pull down the stylesheet from CS.