NET - Duncan Mackenzie .NET

ImageShack Toolbar causes incorrect results from ASP.NET's browser checking code

2008-01-10T04:08:00

We recently updated a few of our web sites with code that would provide a 'nicer' experience for browsers that were not compatible with the ASP.NET ATLAS (AJAX) scripts we were using. For some reason though, a few users who were running a fully compatible browser (Firefox 2.0.0.*), were seeing the no-script experience. We were puzzled, but one of the users figured out that their ImageShack toolbar might be causing the problem. Sure enough, after I installed that same toolbar myself I was able to test and confirm that it truly is causing the confusion.

Using a little test page, http://www.duncanmackenzie.net/services/browserinfo.aspx (feel free to use it for your own testing), I received the following results for Firefox 2.0.0.11 on Vista before installing the ImageShack toolbar.

Request.Browser

.Type: Firefox2.0.0.11
.Platform: WinNT
.Version: 2.0.0.11
.Browser: Firefox
.Crawler: False
.EcmaScriptVersion: 1.4
.IsMobileDevice: False
.MobileDeviceManufacturer: Unknown
.MobileDeviceModel: Unknown
.Beta: False

After installing the toolbar, I get this:

Request.Browser

.Type: Mozilla1.8.1.11
.Platform: WinNT
.Version: 1.8.1.11
.Browser: Mozilla
.Crawler: False
.EcmaScriptVersion: 1.4
.IsMobileDevice: False
.MobileDeviceManufacturer: Unknown
.MobileDeviceModel: Unknown
.Beta: False

Note the version change and the change in Request.Browser.Browser, certainly enough to throw off our atlas-compatibility check. I haven't figured out the appropriate fix for this yet, but it is nice to at least have one possible explanation as to why valid browsers are sometimes seeing our 'no script' experience.

Code Metrics in Visual Studio 2008 and the EvNet project

2008-01-07T23:24:00

I don't know if this is good or bad, but I thought it was neat that I could right-click the main project (excluding all our client script and HTML) that runs behind on10.net, pick code metrics and see cool #s like "23,442 lines of code" :)

Lately though, I've seen us reducing that number while adding features, so this might the highest result I'll ever see for this project :)

The Viewport Meta Tag and the iPhone

2008-01-03T02:55:00

I've been fiddling around with mobile interfaces for both my personal site and for the various sites I work on (http://on10.net, http://channel9.msdn.com, amongst others) and I noticed the use of <meta name="viewport" content... /> on some other mobile sites. A quick search and I found a great discussion of the viewport meta tag on furbo.org (the apple developer site provides the same info in a more reference format). Turns out this simple meta tag helps Mobile Safari determine how best to scale your site for the smaller screen of the iPhone (relative to a desktop that is). I don't have an iPhone, or an iPod touch for that matter (I gather the experience would be similar... if you don't want to get a full blown cell account I'd suggest the 'touch' for testing purposes), although I found a great testing site for the iPhone (best viewed with Safari 3.0 on your desktop).

Looking for good examples of Mobile Interfaces

2008-01-03T17:29:00

I'm part of a dev team that builds blog/forum software and I've been thinking about mobile interfaces lately... so I'm trying to find a good example of site like ours that provides a good (enjoyable, useful and usable) mobile interface... one that will work across a variety of browses. It seems 37 Signals is thinking about the same thing these days and they've made a blog post looking for exactly the same thing I am, examples of good mobile interfaces. I'm looking for sites that are some combination of text and video blogging and are usable via a relatively modern phone. I found a lot of the comments to that post to be completely unhelpful... because they were focused on sites that are specific to the iPhone! Building an interface for the iPhone is not a bad idea, but I certainly wouldn't try to do that until after we had a good general purpose interface for a much wider variety of mobile devices. I did find a few interesting sites though, from the comments and from another site (Brian Cantoni's list of good mobile sites at http://cantoni.mobi/):

http://mobile.seriouseats.com/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/text_only.stm
http://bbcriver.com/ (seems like it would benefit from some paging, but I could be wrong... is one big page better on a phone than paging?)
http://m.joystiq.com/

Of course, all of these map well to the home page of our site(s) (like on10.net or Channel 9), I wonder if there are any good examples for a web forum? I'm pretty sure that a lot of our users would like to be able to view Channel 9's Coffeehouse on their mobile device, and off hand I don't know what the ideal experience for that would be.

On a related note, Brian Cantoni (the author of that list of good mobile sites) has a great series of blog articles about testing your web applications across all major smartphone platforms.

I'm planning to get rid of setting our Theme in ASP.NET

2007-12-16T16:46:00

The auto inclusion of all our CSS files has finally become too annoying. We'll still use the app_theme directory, as it is a handy way to store our stuff... but I'm really hoping to not set the theme, and to add the appropriate CSS for the situation (mobile vs desktop for example) while also combining our CSS files and 'minifying' them all through a simple 'css.ashx' style handler. This should make it easier to do that combining at run time, while leaving them nice and separate for debug and development purposes.

We might still have it set in development mode though, if it is necessary to get some of the editor awareness of our CSS... but I think we can make it work.

Death to app_themes!

The code for my blog site is now available on codeplex.com

2007-10-24T00:56:00

For anyone who is interested in using the code behind this site for their own blog, or who just finds reading code to be a fun pastime, you can go to http://www.codeplex.com/oxite to check it out. Of course, there are other blog engines up there, including blog engine .NET (which appears to be very highly supported and recommended by many folks), if you are in the market for some free blogging code.

The Channel 9/Channel 10 team is hiring

2007-06-28T12:16:00

Hey folks, I work as the dev lead for Channel 9, Channel 10, Mix Online and other sites. We build community sites for Microsoft using video, audio and text blogging and we build them using the latest .NET technologies. If you are into web development, if you have a passion for design and user experience, and if you really rock at AJAX, Javascript, CSS, C# and ASP.NET .... then this is the job for you :)

The Developer and Platform Evangelism Team is hiring a software design engineer to join the team that builds and extends Channel 9, Channel 10 and more. Our sites build a two way interaction between our customers and Microsoft using video as the primary communication tool. In the past several years we have built several additional sites and our network has grown in both traffic and content, and as a result we are looking for an additional Software Design Engineer to join the team. We are looking for someone who lives and breathes HTML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX and ASP.NET. The ideal candidate will have skills in all those technologies combined with a passion for design and user experience.

Do you like to ship, takes chances and effect change? Do you want to build cool sites that use Silverlight and Atlas to deliver a great user experience? Then come join our group where you'll find a small dynamic team of folks and you'll swear you are part of startup.
Experience in HTML/CSS, ASP.NET and C# is required and experience with AJAX, SQL, Scrum and Test-Driven Development is highly desired. Experience with Silverlight and/or WPF is not required but it would be great to have.

If you are interested and you meet the requirements, go to the official job listing on the Microsoft careers site and submit your resume!

Internal Microsoft tool, eScrum, is available to the public...

2007-06-22T19:10:00

We (the dev team behind Channel 9, Channel 10, Mix Online, and others ...)been doing scrum-ish development for a few sprints now, but we recently switched to using eScrum. This is a set of templates and tools for use with Team Foundation Server and it really rocks. There are few less-than-polished elements about the install and the web interface, but I'm glad they shipped it out for general use.

You can read a good summary of eScrum on the blog 'A Developer's Life', which is also a good resource for lots of other Visual Studio related news.

Need to write a parser of your own?

2007-06-13T02:41:00

I haven't had to write a parser since university, but if I had to write one now I'd definitely be checking out Tommy Carlier's 10 part series showing how to write a parser for a demo programming language of his own creation.

If you are wondering where I get my Xbox Live info...

2007-06-02T03:18:00

A few people have emailed me or posted comments wondering how I grab the Xbox Info for the Twitter app and for my services.

It is not from scraping and it is not from any publicly available source. I joined the Xbox Community Developer Program (XCDP), which is an official program designed to support folks who are building community sites (forums, reviews, blogs, etc...) around Xbox related topics.

Many folks who want Xbox info, are not working on a large site like the people in the XCDP, which is exactly why I created my service. This way, people who are building a small tool or script, most likely to be used by a small number of folks, can have access to some well formed and easy to use data.

What if you would qualify for the XCDP? Well, at the moment I don't have any direct link for you, but I'll ask around to see if I can find a link or a contact for anyone may qualify and would like to sign up....

Put up a REST API for Xbox Gamertag Data

2007-05-27T02:37:00

My twitter app uses a web service hosted on my site to get all the necessary Xbox Live info.... way more than the twitter app actually uses. This is a SOAP API, located here:

http://duncanmackenzie.net/services/XboxInfo.asmx

I know that some people prefer a more RESTful API though, so I also have another 'page' that you can call with a straight GET request and just pass the gamertag in as a query string parameter:

http://duncanmackenzie.net/services/GetXboxInfo.aspx?GamerTag=Festive+Turkey

Enjoy!

Speeding up your default document on an IIS web server

2007-01-19T17:14:00

Great little post today, something that makes perfect sense but I've never heard it before...

How to speed up your most popular web page

Check out the new Community Bar on on10.net

2006-11-29T02:15:00

One of my jobs over the past couple of weeks has been to build a javascript based 'toolbar' that could run across the top of on10.net and show folks headlines aggregated from a variety of Microsoft Community sites. So, along with a bunch of help from Adam and Erik, I managed to get it finished and deployed today. You can see it on top of the page on 10

If it overlaps with the logo for you, try forcing a refresh using ctrl+f5 in IE... or just picking reload/refresh in whatever browser you use... the css had to change to accomodate this new content and the old css often sticks in the cache longer than it should.

Amazon Web Services talk in Winnipeg

2006-10-04T14:25:00

I love Winnipeg, but it doesn't normally get all that many developer focused talks... so if you live there and you are interested in .NET based web development, you should really get down to this event.

Winnipeg .NET User Group

Winnipeg, Canada
October 5, 2006 "Bleeding Edge Web Services"
Come hear AWS evangelist Mike Culver showcase some thought-provoking new directions into which Web Services are headed. The presentation will provide an overview of Amazon Web Services, and feature a code demonstration showing how .NET developers are able to easily build managed clients for these services.

The EvNet team is on Channel 9 again

2006-09-27T17:01:00

This time we are shipping the latest update to Microsoft 10, fun stuff... and an example of exactly how far from normal our team can be.

WPF/Avalon seems so easy, it might be time for me to try it out :)

2006-09-07T04:39:00

I was browsing on www.xamlog.com and I found this tutorial on "Reflection using Visual Brush and Opacity Mask", which shows you how to produce this effect:

with very little code/markup.

Hmm... now that I finally have Vista up and running, it might be worth giving it a try.

The on10/Channel 9 Dev team have another dev focused video up

2006-09-07T04:39:00

I even got to be the 'preview' image! Check this out to hear a bit more about our design and implementation of on10.net, and for some more info on our plans around on10.net going forward and for moving Channel 9 on to this new code base.

Microsoft Gamefest

2006-09-07T04:39:00

Met with Dave Mitchell from the Xbox team today to talk about Microsoft Gamefest. If you are going, drop me a line... I'll be there with a camera along with one or two other folks from on10.net.

Considering Team System? Check out the Team System Customization Toolkit...

2006-09-07T04:38:00

Customizing VSTS to work exactly how you or your company needs it to isn't an easy job, but this toolkit should make it easier!

VSTS Customization Toolkit with new Process Template Editor

The Visual Studio Team System Customization Toolkit contains everything you need to graphically manage process templates, work item types and global lists. The latest release, the Process Template Editor, simplifies the customization of VSTS templates with an easy to use GUI. Start customizing today!

Learn a bit about how on10.net was made

2006-09-07T04:38:00

Interview with the dev team (including me) is up on Channel 9

Have you tried my RSS editor? Comments?

2006-09-07T04:37:00

Ok, so I'm fishing for comments... not compliments at least, but I'm still fishing... I've seen a fair bit of traffic to the install point but not a single email or blog comment about this app... go ahead fire away (and yes, I know that it doesn't do Atom feeds... yet).

Beta versions of the MSDN home page now available...

2006-09-07T04:36:00

I've been working (as part of a large team!) on the new platform for MSDN, which is up and running at http://msdn2.microsoft.com... and now you can see prototype versions of the MSDN home page ontop of that same platform. Check it out here [http://beta.msdn.microsoft.com/default.aspx]. The new home page demonstrates some of the personalization/profile features that will end up on the final MSDN site in the near future.

Looks like I coded myself into a corner here...

2006-09-07T04:36:00

This is the sort of thing that happens with large development teams, one team codes in 'fixes' that break someone else's work... I don't normally do this all by myself! I updated the Flairmaker to support Atom 0.3, then I updated my feeds to Atom 1.0 ... great.

See the error, laugh at the coder... or will it be fixed by the time you click this?

Just arrived for ASP.NET Connections...

2006-09-07T04:36:00

Landed in Vegas for the conference, talk is on Thursday.... I'll be talking about MSDN2.microsoft.com, but more specifically I'll be covering the use of the Virtual Page Provider feature in ASP.NET 2.0, so if that type of thing appeals to you, come by and check it out!

RSS feed authoring for those without blog software or an enjoyment of typing angle brackets

2006-09-07T04:36:00

Blogs and blogging software seem to be everywhere these days, and RSS has been a top buzzword for quite some time, everyone and their dog wants to take advantage of this new trend and technology. The problem is, it isn't a simple process to create and maintain a valid RSS file. If you aren't willing to run a complete blogging system or if you aren't capable of hand-editing XML, then you don't have a lot of options. For most of the folks that will read this blog entry, you probably don't have this problem, producing RSS 2.0 wouldn't be much of an issue for a developer, but there are times when we want less technical folks to be able to author their own feeds without any assistance. At MSDN we started thinking about this very problem ourselves recently when we decided that, in addition to all the feeds that come out of our content systems, there was a need to create some small feeds that didn't necessarily fit into our larger content systems. Handing off the task of feed creation to notepad or Front Page wasn't an appealing thought and that path would probably result in a lot of xml editing errors and invalid feeds.

This problem happened to line up with a sample I had been thinking of though, so I wrote a quick app using VC# Express 2005 to try and help out; a Feed Writer that allows you to create new RSS 2.0 feeds, edit existing ones, and even import entries from one feed to another. I stuck to a tried and true UI structure, tree along the left side then entry fields on the right:

This app has been developed without the general user in mind, MSDN/TechNet were the targets and because of that there are some fields in this UI that are only relevant to the needs of those groups. For example, the list of attributes you can see on the lower-right is specific to the needs of MSDN and TechNet, who need to markup the feed entries with the appropriate choices. The "Type" and "HeadlineImage" fields are also specific to MSDN feeds, I'm planning to adapt it to work with 'standard' RSS 2.0 items and the category element to make it more general purpose, but for now I thought I'd show you the version I already have running.

In a rather backwards fashion, I'm going to finish up this as a sample and write the article, now that I've finished the actual practical version of the same system... but it will all work out in the end.

Moved my .Text blog from Atom 0.3 to Atom 1.0

2006-09-07T04:36:00

I only recently noticed that my blog software (.Text 0.95) had atom support built in, so I added a button to my main page, and then I noticed it was Atom 0.3. Since 0.3 was recently deprecated, I updated the Atom generating code to output 1.0 instead and voila;

Much thanks to rakaz's great guide on moving from 0.3 to 1.0, which enabled me to update my code with almost no knowledge of Atom 0.3 or 1.0 :)

Some great podcasts on VB6 -> .NET and more...

2006-09-07T04:35:00

I was reading the dotnetjunkies.com newsletter and I spotted these podcasts, a series of them that I have never noticed before, even though they definitely the kind of content I'd be interested in hearing.

Moving to .NET from VB6 and C++
Juval Lowy discusses the different perspectives that VB6 and C++ developers bring to .NET including the challenges each group faces with the technology. (MP3 audio, 16:32 mins.)

VB6 Glass Ceiling
.NET Software Legend Juval Lowy offers his thoughts on the non-linear relationship between VB6 application complexity and developer capabilities in this provocative interview. (MP3 audio, 16:19 mins.)
Perf Stats of the Upgrade Tools
Keith Pleas discusses the performance characteristics of the Upgrade Wizard and VB6 Assessment tool, and Microsoft Product Manager Eugenio Pace describes the status of the VB6 to VB.NET Upgrade guide and availability of the VB6 Assessment tool. (MP3 audio, 13:51 mins.)
.NET Upgrade Metrics and the Migration Assessment Tool
Keith Pleas of Keith Pleas & Associates explains how the new .NET Migration Assessment Tool provides stats across multiple projects to help measure upgrade costs. He also discusses cleaning up dead code before updating and the risks of memory pinning in a managed environment. (MP3 audio, 14:18 mins)
More Pod Casts >>

Added Atom support to the FlairMaker... my version at least

2006-09-07T04:35:00

Nick, from "The Coding Monkey" mentioned that he would like to see Atom support in the FlairMaker, so ... having no real reason not to, and having an extra 15 minutes after the kids went to sleep before I started cleaning up the house, I added it...

Of course, I've just added this to my forked version of Kent's original code... so any feature I add that he likes will need to manually added into his version... bad software development practice, but hey we're just playing around here so you should be expecting too much.

Update: I also modified the code to pull the blog's title from the feed (Atom or RSS) and stick it at the bottom. Not that useful of a feature for the Coding 4 Fun version, since it is always pointing at the same feed... but useful for mine if people want to use it for their own feeds

Series of posts about how MSBuild works with VS

2006-09-07T04:35:00

Neil Enns of the MSBuild team has released the first of a series of posts about how MSBuild works within Visual Studio, how VS projects are used by MSBuild and basically everything you'd want to know about how the two systems interact.

You can check out all the entries here, in order from most recent to oldest, as they are posted.

Little "Memory" game up on the MSDN Magazine site...

2006-09-07T04:35:00

Check it out here...

My old guide to the Updater Application Block is up at a new URL...

2006-09-07T04:35:00

Back on the weblogs.asp.net site, I had posted an article on how to setup your application to work with the Application Updater from PAG, but that URL was having issues so I have reposted it up onto this site for anyone who might be looking around for it... http://blogs.duncanmackenzie.net/duncanma/articles/2812.aspx

After some discussions with Sam Ruby and others on the FeedValidator mailing list, the MSDN RSS feed validates as is...

2006-09-07T04:35:00

In an earlier post, I discussed the fact that the MSDN feeds were failing to validate due to a MIME type that included parameters (charset in this case, like 'text/html ;charset=utf-8'), but I also posted a query about this issue into the listserv for FeedValidator.org. Sam mentioned it on his blog, and then went ahead and updated the validator to recognize a MIME type with parameter as valid.

In the meantime, I updated the MSDN generator to strip out the parameters :), but I still think they are technically valid so I'm glad the feed validates as it is today (with params) and as it will exist in the near future with the MIME types stripped down to just type/subtype.

VB Futures section up on MSDN...

2006-09-07T04:35:00

Now, to me, VB 2005 is the "future", and anything beyond that is really just coffee-break information to read briefly.... but I guess I wouldn't be a very good Microsoft person if I didn't start pushing the version-after-next version of our development tools before the next version has even shipped.

So, with that in mind, check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/future/ which, despite my comments, is quite a good pile of info on post-Whidbey VB features and even includes a download to bring LINQ features in VB 2005. Hmm... ok, I guess with that download it seems a bit more 'current' to me ... hmph...

New MSN Developer Center is live...

2006-09-07T04:35:00

I've played around with coding against the Messenger APIs before, but it seems that MSN has really gone all out now and released a bunch of information for coding against their search, messenger, mapping services, and more... check it out on MSDN as of today!

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msn/

A public site for collecting your exception info... like Dr. Watson via SOAP...

2006-09-07T04:35:00

This is an interesting idea ... http://www.exceptioncollection.com/, something that I've pondered before...

I'd have to know more about it, in terms of the privacy and security of their data collection... before I could recommend it without any pause, but I would certainly take a look if you are building a widely distributed application (outside of a single company/enterprise), and I would probably try to integrate with the Exception handling/logging block from PAG.

Doing interesting things with XSL

2006-09-07T04:34:00

I've been messing around with using XSL to display RSS on MSDN, as a simpler alternative to a custom ASP.NET control, and while it works perfectly in the core case (display all the items in a feed in a format), there are two additional requirements that were very easy to handle in a .NET class, but trickier (for me) in XSL.

Display the top n items
Out of the full list, display n randomly picked items

For the first, it was pretty easy... <xsl:if test="position < 6"> could be used to only output the top 5 items, for example... For the second though, I was stumped for a bit... then I came up with an idea. I would write a script function that would pick n items out of the total count, put those choices into an array, then use another function that tests the current position against that list of choices... sound good? Well, I'm still working on implementing this one... I have it working, but I'm not 100% sure of my solution.

If you are interested, you can see the code running here, and pull down the xsl from here, and the backing rss file from here. Code for the page ... Code for the control it references...

IE 7 will have a new User Agent string, of course, so it might be worth checking your code...

2006-09-07T04:34:00

This should only be an issue if you've written code that checks for version=6, instead of version =>6, but that happens so you might want read the following blog entry about this new version.

Server Intellect now has Beta 2 hosting!!!

2006-09-07T04:34:00

Server Intellect, my web host and the folks that I called "the best hosting company I have ever worked with" have annouced that they now have ASP.NET Beta 2 hosting available... for free for anyone using one of their other hosting plans!

Server Intellect is proud to announce hosting support for ASP.NET 2.0 Beta 2!

Free 'Starter Tier' account for all Server Intellect Clients!

The first version of ASP.NET offered several important advantages over previous Web development models. ASP.NET 2.0 improves upon that foundation by adding support for several new and exciting features in the areas of developer productivity, administration and management, extensibility, and performance.

Server Intellect is giving all clients a Free Account in the ASP.NET 2.0 Beta 2 Environment!

Your own Domain Name
250 MB Space
10 GB Bandwidth
Advanced Traffic Stats
10 Email Accounts
5 FTP Accounts
Much, Much More!
This account will remain active for up to 45 days after the final release of ASP.NET 2.0

Coding4Fun, the site....

2006-09-07T04:34:00

If you've been reading my blog for awhile, you probably know about my column "Coding4Fun", well now there is an entire site on MSDN going by that name... to be clear, this is not a site all about my column :) ... it is a site dedicated to the same concept though, hobbyist coding.

Check it out at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/coding4fun

Update: way more details on the site available at Dan's blog...

AutoIncrement settings should be applied before filling the DataTable...

2006-09-07T04:34:00

I ran into a problem recently, where duplicate IDs were being generated by my offline ADO.NET code... and I had no real idea why this was happening. I had set up the primary key of my DataTable to have the following propery values:

AutoIncrement = true
AutoIncrementSeed = -1
AutoIncrementStep = -1

This is supposed to result in offline IDs being assigned as -1,-2,-3 and therefore having no possibility of conflict with any real IDs used in the database. This has worked great for me on many occasions, so it was a bit of a surprise when I finally tracked down my problem to the IDs that were being assigned to my new rows. I put a break point right after calling NewRow on the DataTable and the newly created Row had a PK value of 141. Another new row and it would have a value of 140, and so on... it seems the AutoIncrementStep was working, but the seed value was wonky.

I asked around and was told to make sure that I was setting the AutoIncrement properties before filling the table, which it turns out I wasn't doing. What I had for code was basically like this:

If table doesn't exist in DataSet, set a flag to true indicating that this is the first call to the data load
Fill the table
Check the flag and setup the table, including setting the AutoIncrement properties

With the new guidance I had received, I changed the routine to:

If table doesn't exist in DataSet, set a flag to true indicating that this is the first call to the data load
Fill the table's schema (FillSchema), to get the columns and the PK
Check the flag and setup the table, including setting the AutoIncrement properties
Fill the table

Of course, all this could be made simpler/cleaner if I built up the schema 'manually' before loading the table's data but I'm way too lazy for that.

Interested in Investigating Indigo?

2006-09-07T04:34:00

Scott Seely, a former MSDN co-worker of mine and now a member of the Indigo team, is working on a new Indigo book with Brian Nantz. The book won't be out for a while, but you can get a lot of advance information (including some of the chapters), by watching for updates on www.thatindigobook.com. Should be a great way to get a free taste of some Indigo content right from someone who works on the code...

MSDN has Forums!

2006-09-07T04:33:00

Looks like I have a new place to hang out and answer questions...

http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/

...there is even a VB board!

My latest MSDN magazine article is online...

2006-09-07T04:33:00

Remembering User Information in Visual Basic .NET
This article provides coverage of storing user-specific settings using XML Serialization

Doing uploads with BITS

2006-09-07T04:33:00

I wrote a couple of articles on BITS in the past (creating a wrapper, then background copying, then digital grandma) but it was all about downloading files. Starting with BITS 1.5, you can also upload files... is that topic of interest to folks? Just FYI, you need web server support to make this work, as detailed here.

Just pulled down the CS 1.0 source... now to start working on a migration plan

2006-09-07T04:33:00

Currently I'm running .Text .94 + a bunch of private modifications and some version of CS:Forums + a bunch of private modifications... so now that CS 1.0's source is out, I want to incorporate my mods into the combined package and then migrate my data and get my site up and running on the new stuff. As cool as that is, and while I'm sure it has excellent tools/scripts for upgrading, I'm not looking forward to it. It was hard enough to get my site set up now, with blogs.duncanmackenzie.net running as its own app domain and then trying to make the Forums code work when the application started at the root not at /Forums. Anyway, suffice it to say I don't expect to upgrade right away, but maybe I'll have a copy of the site upgraded and sitting on my dev box within the next week....

Anyone else gone through the upgrade/migration and have any thoughts or comments?

This may seem odd... but people kept asking for it, so here you go...

2006-09-07T04:33:00

On the various programming forums I read, a common question is "how can I find out the IP address of my router"... for whatever reason (and there certainly are a few reasons that I can think of) people were really looking for their IP address on the Internet. In general, the solution was to hit one of a few publically available sites out there that display your IP when you view their web pages and then scrape the IP address back out of the HTML. Simple enough, but I thought I would make it simpler for anyone who needed this solution by creating a quick and simple web service.

I just love finding code samples :)

2006-09-07T04:32:00

Aaron Brethorst has a little page of his code samples up at http://www.brethorsting.com/code/ which include a few interesting items including a software version of the Enigma machine in C#. Cool stuff. Aaron is also the author of iRooster, an alarm clock application (that uses playlists from iTunes) which also looks neat, but runs on the Mac so it isn't something that I have any real use for... :).

Community Server 1.0 Released

2006-09-07T04:32:00

Telligent Systems, the company founded by former Microsoftie (and ASP.NET whiz kid) Rob Howard, has finally released Community Server 1.0. Community Server combines the functionality of forums (based on the ASP.NET forums engine Rob worked on while at Microsoft), blogs (based on the very popular .Text engine created by Scott Watermasysk, who now works for Telligent), and photo gallery (based on nGallery, created by Jason Alexander, who's also one of the brains at Telligent).

Congrats to the Telligent team...I'm looking forward to trying out CS 1.0 for my personal blog, which is currently running on an older version of .Text.

from G. Andrew Duthie's blog....

Getting the 8.3 filename...

2006-09-07T04:32:00

Quick sample (calling the GetShortPathName API) in VB.NET posted to http://www.duncanmackenzie.net/Samples/

Free XP Themed Windows Forms Controls

2006-09-07T04:32:00

I bet I've mentioned these before, but the joy of rediscovery is the positive side of a poor memory... Christopher Frazier pointed to these in a email discussion today, and I thought you might be interested!

SteepValley.NET: XP Common Controls

The XP Common Controls are a collection of themed and unthemed controls that are currently missing from the Visual Studio IDE...

The new Release of Version 2.0 from Sept. 9th, 2004 includes several new features including:

New Namespace

fully editable themed properties

XPListView enhancements

new controls

more...

This project is available for free including the source code.