graemef.com

Which Family Guy character are you?

A couple of weeks ago I was trying to work out how I could correctly decode the contents of a web page which might specify a character set in its headers.

Feroze has just posted some code that does just this! Although I did write my own code to do the same thing, I’ll incorporate his version in the next build of FetchLinks as it’s likely to be more robust than mine.

Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V… Thanks Feroze!

Developing for my iPAQ is definately something I want to get my teeth into. I’ve had a play with the .NET Compact Framework using Visual Studio .NET, and I’m happy to report that the development experience is very familiar to a Windows Forms developer such as myself.

Anyway, the new Windows Mobile Team Blog has some useful information on it already. I hope Robert & Co keep it coming… I’m listening!

Yesterday’s User Friendly sums it up nicely.

Ever wonder what kind of user interfaces will be easier to create once Longhorn is available?

Check out Mail Magic and just try to imagine the power of Avalon in this guy’s hands…

Matt writes: Well, I just finished installing VS.NET 2005 CTP, and first I have to say - great job on the installation VS.NET Team! This was the shortest install I’ve ever seen for VS.NET. It didn’t eve look like the thing was installing, I thought I was still installing Pre-Reqs…but no - its done.

Bah. I don’t have access to MSDN Universal, so I suppose I’ll have to do without for now.

Judging by Matt’s obvious excitement (see the rest of his post) it looks like it’ll be worth the wait!

Today I “met” a fellow blogger not directly through blogging for the first time… Hi Simon!

Matt says: I would have to say that dogfooding is always a good idea on whatever application you’re using. Maybe I’ll find something I like or don’t like about it that I can change. Gotta love it.

True. I’ve been using PopHeadlines all day every day as my primary RSS aggregator since the very first version I built. Since writing the FetchLinks plugin I’ve moved about half of my feeds to NewsGator and the other half I still subscribe to with PopHeadlines.

If you’re eating that much of your own dog food, you know that when you stop actively developing it and you find you still use it, you you’ve probably got something worthwhile.

Just a word of warning for MSDN library users… I found this in the readme for the April 2004 edition:

MSDN Library stop list

A word stop list has been used to reduce the size of the keyword index and increase search performance. The following words are included on the MSDN Library word stop list and will be ignored in a search: a, about, after, against, all, along, also, although, am, among, an, and, are, as, at, be, became, because, been, being, between, but, by, can, caution, come, could, details, did, do, does, doing, done, during, each, early, far, finally, for, found, from, had, has, have, he, her, here, his, how, however, I, if, in, include, including, information, into, is, it, its, late, later, made, many, may, me, med, might, more, most, near, no, non, none, nor, not, note, of, off, on, only, or, other, over, saw, see, seen, several, she, since, so, some, such, than, that, the, their, them, then, there, these, they, this, those, through, tip, to, too, under, until, up, us, use, very, warning, was, we, were, when, where, which, while, who, with, you.

So, how exactly are we supposed to search for information about compiler warnings, if the word “warning” is in the stop list? D’oh!

Here are some other words which might have been useful, what with being C# keywords and all (maybe others too, I didn’t study the list too hard): as, is, if, for, finally, do, while, in

Uh-oh. I installed Windows XP Service Pack 2 RC1 on my desktop development machine and now I get the following error when trying to debug a Windows Forms application with Visual Studio .NET 2003:

---------------------------Microsoft Development Environment---------------------------Error while trying to run project: Unable to start debugging.


The debugger is not properly installed. Run setup to install or repair the debugger.---------------------------OK ---------------------------

I’ve already installed SP2 on my laptop and the VS.NET debugger still works OK on there.

Anyway, I’m repairing Visual Studio .NET on my desktop machine as I write… Any other ideas?

Update: OK, that didn’t work. I’m removing SP2 for now.