graemef.com

Maxq: Firefox now also detects RSS feeds and displays an orange "RSS" icon at the bottom of the browser. Right now clicking it shows the feeds and gives you the option of bookmarking them.

Looks like there’ll be plenty of scope for "subscribe with aggregator" extensions in the forthcoming Firefox release, never mind subscribing with Firefox itself (which the rest of the article implies). Can’t wait!

I’m trying to add support for cookies to FetchLinks, so feeds from sites like Yahoo Groups and the New York Times work correctly. It seems like there’s no support for loading cookies in the .NET Framework, but there is a way to get the path to the cookies folder:

string path = System.Environment.GetFolderPath( System.Environment.SpecialFolder.Cookies );

Whoop-de-frikkin-do

So, what’s in the folder? How do I get at the cookies I need to send in the WebRequest? The closest I’ve found to documemtation is this, and it’s not particularly encouraging. And, even if I can successfully parse the files and pass on the correct cookie information, it will still only work with cookies stored by Internet Explorer - possibly even only version 6 of Internet Explorer. What about FireFox users?

This is not the trivial addition to FetchLinks we were all hoping for.

Looks like Jamie is back from holiday, and he’s continuing to tease us with promises of an article on targetting the .NET Framework 1.x with MSBuild and Visual Studio 2005. Whatever it is, I’m sure it’ll be better than the batch file I’m currently using to build FetchLinks…

Until just now, anonymous users were not allowed to view bug reports on this site. That was completely unintentional (honest!), and is now fixed.

You can view FetchLinks issues here, and regsitered users can post new issues too. Please use this to report any problems you find with FetchLinks. Thanks!

Update: Registered users really can create bug reports now. I’ve even tried it myself

I bought my Xbox years ago. I was one of the geeks who queued up on the day of their release and paid, uh, a lot of money for it. It’s had a good innings, but for quite a while now it’s been failing to read discs. Half the time it won’t work at all and the other half of the time the disc spins up and down a lot so games take a long time to load and music stutters.

Now that it’s hardly worth repairing, I’m tempted to buy a replacement. However, I’ll need to transfer all my saved games etc. (and a lot of them won’t fit on a memory card) onto the new box. My Xbox Live! account will also have to move over. Basically I want to "clone" the hard disc onto the new Xbox, but without breaking the warranty. Maybe this can be done over the network? I’ll see if I can find out…

I’ve been abandoning ntl for other service providers over the last few months. A while back we moved to Sky for TV. I’d been wanting to get a PVR for a long time, and there simply isn’t a PVR that you can use with ntl’s digital TV service. The final straw, however, was the last upgrade to the software running on the digibox. Overnight, it became virtually unusable - incredibly slow to flick the TV guide between channels, and frequently locking up requiring a power cycle.

Having waited for several years for ntl to implement Caller ID on the phone line, today we moved to BT for the phone. Sure enough, now we’ve got caller ID.

Now that we have a BT line, ADSL is a possibility, so I’m looking into going elsewhere for broadband, too. We’ve had 512Kbps (or more, I think it’s 600Kbps now) with ntl since November 1999 (exactly one week before my son was born - that’s how I remember), and ever since the 1GB/day "guideline" I’ve been thinking about giving ADSL a try. There are plenty of ADSL providers who can match ntl for bang/buck (especially when you look at 1Mbps), but without any cap.

So I’ve filled in the form to see if we can get ADSL here and we can… but only just. Apparently we’re quite a long way away from the exchange and so can only get 512Kbps at the moment. The word on the street, however, is that this is likely to change, possibly in the next few weeks on 6th September. I suppose I’ll hang on a bit for that, then…

ntl have been through some tough times in recent years, and it’s not hard to see why. Their services just don’t cut it. I did my best to be a loyal customer, but things were actually getting worse over time, not better. Surely the update to the TV software alone will have customers leaving in in their thousands. What’s the incentive to stay? Beats me.

I have a handy code snippet I use again and again in Vidual Studio. It creates a property, it’s backing field, a PropertyChanged event and an OnPropertyChanged method. Here it is as a Visual Studio 2005 Code Expansion.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?><CodeSnippet Format="1.0.0">   <Header>       <Title>propertyEvent</Title>       <Shortcut>prope</Shortcut>       <Description>Generate property, backing field andevent</Description>       <SnippetTypes>           <SnippetType>Expansion</SnippetType>       </SnippetTypes>   </Header>   <Snippet>       <Declarations>           <Literal default="true">               <ID>type</ID>               <ToolTip>Property type</ToolTip>               <Default>object</Default>           </Literal>           <Literal>               <ID>property</ID>               <ToolTip>Property name</ToolTip>               <Default>MyProperty</Default>           </Literal>           <Literal>               <ID>field</ID>               <ToolTip>The variable backing this property</ToolTip>               <Default>myVar</Default>           </Literal>           <Literal>               <ID>initialValue</ID>               <ToolTip>The inital value of the property</ToolTip>               <Default>null</Default>           </Literal>       </Declarations>       <Code Language="csharp" Format="CData"><![CDATA[#region $property$property       private $type$ $field$ = $initialValue$;

       public $type$ $property$       {           get           {               return $field$;           }           set           {               if ($field$ != value)               {                   $field$ = value;                   On$property$Changed();               }           }       }

       /// <summary>       /// Event raised after the $property$ property has changed.       /// </summary>       public event EventHandler $property$Changed;

       /// <summary>       /// Raises the $property$Changed event.       /// </summary>       protected virtual void On$property$Changed()       {           if ($property$Changed != null)               $property$Changed(this, EventArgs.Empty);       }       #endregion       $end$]]>       </Code>   </Snippet></CodeSnippet> 

To use, save the above as an XML file in one of the folders in your Code Snippet Manager, and then use the "Insert Expansion" option from the IntelliSense menu to insert it.

Does anyone have a better version of the above?

Update: Here’s an MSDN article about Code Snippets (via Windows Forms .NET)

I’ve resorted to building FetchLinks from the command line (I’m an IDE jockey, so it’s not been easy!) and I think I’ve built a version that will be suitable for release, but first I’d like a couple of volunteers to give it a try for me.

Email me if you’d like to help and I’ll send it to you. Ideally, you’d be trying it on a machine with .NET 1.1 but not the 2.0 beta.

I installed Service Pack 2 for Windows XP on my work machine this morning. I’ve been running Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 on it for a while, but once I updated to SP2 VS became unusable.

1. The integrated SourceSafe tools became really slow. I’d have to wait about half a minute before continuing with my work.
2. IntelliSense stopped working correctly. Every time I let it complete something for me the cursor would move to the end of the line. Extremely frustrating!
3. It crashed - not a lot, but a lot more than usual.

Thinking the SourceSafe slowdown might be the firewall’s fault, I tried disabling it but that didn’t make any difference. As much as I’d like to troubleshoot this properly and find out more, I’ve got work I need to get done so SP2 is coming off for now. Maybe I’ll repave my development machine someday soon - I’ve been installing all kinds of beta software on it for 18 months now without ever cleaning it out, so that’s not bad going I suppose.

Has anyone else had problems with these two together? And more importantly, did you solve them?