Duncan Mackenzie.NET

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 […]

A few of my friends and co-workers have jumped on the FeedBurner bandwagon, and I've been pretty impressed with the stats they've been gathering. I'm not willing to send […]

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 experi […]

UPDATE: I've updated this application since the original version, addressing most of the 'known issues' listed below […]

A friend of mine has written this google gadget in true mashup style... it uses an API from Feedburner, a service to produce the graphics, and works async to update itself right in the browser ... and produces a sweet little graphic about your current # of subscribers. […]

I recently noticed a bug in the trackback code on Channel 10, some sites were failing to send us trackbacks, even though we were receiving trackbacks from other sources and those sites were happily trackbacking (I'm just annoying the spell checker today) other blogs. […]

Kent's blog is back online and in one of his recent posts he updates us on all the projects he's been working since he left Microsoft (where we were both working at MSDN as content strategists)... tons of cool stuff, definitely worth reading through and following some links. […]

Some people have great ideas, like Tom Werner's Gravatar (Globally Recognized Avatar) site... a single place on the web to upload an avatar that any blog software can then retrieve using a fairly easily constructed URL. Neat stuff, I think I'll add it to my site. […]

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I've created a quick and simple list of the 10 team's various blog feeds... so if you'd like to follow along with their personal musings (including mine) then you can grab the OPML file here.

Now that the site appears to be stable, I wanted to mention that my ultra-cool green banner was done for me by Chris from 360Style.net. If you haven't seen his site yet, check it out... my desktop wallpaper is always one of Chris's images

I think we have a real design flaw here... one of those 'neat ideas on your dev box' that maybe shouldn't have really been implemented. […]

For quite some time I've thought Pageviews were a mostly useless number to be tracking for any web site. This was very clear at MSDN, where such stats are tracked very carefully... spreadsheets are created... charts are made... and yet, none of us really believed in the Pageview #s. Instead we used […]

Fixed now though... sorry to anyone who posted a comment (and received a nice "your comment was posted!") ... it was lost into the magical ether.

Not that it affects you, the reader, all that much... but I'm getting around 9000 spam comments a day now. It is crazy. I'd add code to avoid them, but I'm just finishing up a move to some new blog software that Adam and I wrote (you can see it running on Adam's site already) and I don't really want […]

If you are a dev, then this code formatting plug-in is probably the coolest thing out there... I'm still ranking Tim's Flickr plug-in as #1 at the moment, at least my slightly customized version that is, but if you'd like a list of several available plug-ins then this spaces entry is a good place to […]

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 […]

on10.net has a good interview up about the new blogging tool from the Windows Live team. What's cool about this app? For a developer, there is tons to be excited about, including a very easy to use SDK (wrote some plug-in code last night, super easy) and it ships with a bunch of .NET assemblies […]

One of my teammates just left the team ... glad he cleared up some of the rumours as quickly as he did... it was a bit sad how quickly people came up with a list of Microsoft-bashing comments. Anyway, I wonder who is getting his new camera :) […]

I just found this article about a series of Heil microphones that work great for podcasting, although I'm sure they were made with any vocal application in mind... detailed info in the post, although I thought it was odd that I had to scroll all the way down to find the one single link to the actual […]

Erik extended our tag pages on on10.net a bit, check out the full details here as part of our on10.net news blog.

I wrote my own for Trackbacks, which I used to incorporate trackbacks into http://on10.net, but Geoff provides one on his blog (that doesn't appear to support comments, but does support trackbacks, so I thought I had better blog about it to thank him) that does both. Silly me, I hadn't built pingba […]

Personally, I always hated it when people in various product groups at Microsoft would ask me to blog about a specific launch or event... because if I decided to do it, my blog post would go up into a sea of similar posts all appearing within a few hours of each other on blogs.msdn.com. How does […]

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

Perhaps a little bug left over from when they first launched in Japan, but the MSN Spaces feeds seem to specify a language code for at least one english language feed (Brian's)... but it does return en-US for some others. Hmm... it also seems to specify en-US for some feeds that are quite obviously […]

I was playing around with Yahoo's term extraction service, as a possible path to tagging (this is the same service used behind TagCloud.com, for example), and I created this C# class libary with a sample app written in Windows Forms. […]

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). […]

As per the blog entry "Feed icons" and using icons pulled from the new feedicons site. Hopefully MSDN will follow suit as well, which would probably be pretty easy... it looks like they are mostly linking every instance of the 'old' RSS icon to the same graphic. I'll suggest it and we'll see what ha […]

Check out a single entry view on my site to see the new additions

Kent pointed me to this article on xml.com, talking about the benefits of having direct actions available as links in your feeds. This is a good idea, but it is a good idea for any HTML content. If you are going to have a link at the bottom of a MSDN page saying "give us feedback", it would be best […]

I've been working on some feed support in MSDN's new online platform (a beta of which is running http://msdn2.microsoft.com) and I had to decide what content-type to use when outputting a RSS feed. I knew this was a contentious issue in the past, but I thought it might have been resolved so I did so […]

In the end, MSDN didn't end up needing the RSS editor I wrote, so I've stripped out the features and content specific to their needs and started turning it into a more generic RSS creation tool. If you'd like to see it, as it is, you can run it from a ClickOnce install point here on my site. There a […]

I've been trying to fix some XHTML issues on my blog, but two pieces of technology are thwarting my plans.... first, there is the text editor in .Text (FreeTextBox) which appears to be making the first anchor or image tag in the post uppercase, even though I have its XHTML support enabled... (so my […]

About a year or so back I added <category> elements to the MSDN RSS feeds, which seemed like an obvious addition, but it wasn't until recently that I noticed that my own feeds (coming out of my .Text 0.95 based blogging engine) didn't have categories specified in them at all. Not in the main f […]

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 […]

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 o […]

Check it out at http://blogs.duncanmackenzie.net/duncanma, and go make your own at http://www.xbox.com

I was considering adding one (or more) of the many aggregator-buttons (subscribe to this feed in newsgator, add this feed to your MSN start page, etc.) when I found this, one button that handles all of the most popular aggregators through a single link. […]

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 vers […]

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, […]

The RSS generator for MSDN, creator of this feed, and many more ... has a small problem. Way upstream, when various people inside the company enter information about an upcoming headline, they have the ability to specify a URL to a download. The intent was for this to be a URL to an actual downloada […]

In my first post on this site, I mentioned an application that I wrote to copy blog posts from one .Text server to another. Overall, I didn't think the application had any real use after the web service I used was removed from the weblogs.asp.net servers, but I'm posting it anyway for anyone who mig […]

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. […]

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 […]

Google and various blog software vendors recently announced a method to deter comment spam by reducing its benefit to the spammer... it sounds like a pretty good idea, so I updated my installation of .Text to use this new attribute in the comment section by adding just a single line within comments. […]

I like that Bungie is exposing your stats as RSS (see mine here), but it would be cooler if they had added some additional elements and attributes to the feed to describe the games in a more usable format, rather than just in HTML... instead of; <item> <title& […]

I guess I could have just added a category to my blog, but this works... http://www.duncanmackenzie.net/articles/rss.xml

... and it is almost ready to ship.... […]

In a previous post, I mentioned that a flaw in the installation routines for telligent's forum system resulted in the deletion of a fairly important set of data... well, after posting that, a few things happened that impressed me... My web host, easerve, contacted me and let me know they had daily […]

A few people asked about the code for that tool described in my first post on this new site, and I just wanted to reassure anyone who was interested that I would be posting the code soon... I actually ran into a couple of minor bugs in the transfer that I'd like to fix (or at least document) before […]

Within a few hours of being up, I ran into this issue... odd, since it doesn't appear to be affecting very many folks... .Text Threading Bug...If you are one of the 7 regular readers here you might have noticed some problems over the last few weeks. Every so often .Text would display an error page w […]

Last night, I wrote up a little Visual Basic .NET app that uses the .Text web services and moved all my categories and posts to a new .Text server... […]