Robert McLaws: FunWithCoding.NET

Head on over to LonghornBlogs.com for an update on the Longhorn schedule, Windows XP Reloaded, and Windows XP SP2.

This little blurb was missed by most of the news organizations covering Bill Gates' Executive e-mail this morning...

I'm wrapping up the last features for the first beta of VisualBlogger 2004. Wanted to give a brief status report on where I am at, what features it has, and what features are left to be done before the final release.

I'm going to take off my component vendor hat for a minute, and talk about my experience as a customer of ComponentOne. I'm going to try to be objective about this here, and over on my corporate blog, I'll talk about how that experience will alter the way my own company does business.

This is a post testing the new provider model usage in VisualBlogger 2004. I've abstracted the system out, using a modified version of ScottW's .Text object model, so that I can map internal Entry objects into external objects as necessary. This particular test is using the primary DotText95BlogProvider, which uses the http://weblogs.asp.net/yourblog/services/aspnetweblog.asmx web service entry point. This one is still live in all distros, and has more functionality than the SimpleBlogService. It will be superceded by the dottextapi.asmx web service in .Text 0.96, but for now this works well.

Just wanted to give a shoutout to Andy Lim at ASU. He's putting together the Microsoft Imagine Cup competition for Arizona State University, which I have the pleasure of judging in about 5 hours. I'm looking forward to seeing what the students come up with. I'll be gone the rest of the day, but when I get back, I'll blog about the experience, what I saw, who won, etc. Andy's worked hard to put it together. Good luck today guys!

Made some major headway in the past 24 hours, so I thought I'd show off where we're at so far. As soon as Jamie Cansdale gets back from his week-long ski trip (lucky bastard), I can wrap up the VS.NET integration code. Just so you know, VisualBlogger 2004 will operate in two modes: Standalone and IDE Integrated. You'll be able to use this program just like Microsoft Word if you want, or you can dock it in the same place as the Output window in VS.NET, and blog from the dev environment. You could even use it as a real simple HTML editor if you want. We don't have any table support yet (don't know if we ever will) but you could always add those in manually.

The WinForms adventure continues. The CheckedListBox control has been giving me all sorts of problems. For one thing, if you put one in a TabControlPage, and then switch pages, it doesn't hold its state. It took me a little bit of experimentation, but I came up with the following code to help out: