Archives
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MEME: Top 10 Recent Blogs
Back in September, Phil posted on a MEME that didn't get the attention it deserved - what are your Top 10 Recent Blogs ?
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DOS format file (XSHD) for SharpDevelop, IMHO Instant Blogger, etc.
I use IMHO Instant Blogger to edit and post blog articles. One of my favorite features is the code snippet editor. It's built on the SharpDevelop text editor, which has support for language syntaxes which are defined in xml syntax highlight definitions (XSHD's). It's a nice way to show color coded source code on a web page.1
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IE7 Standalone Launch Script
UPDATES
8/31/2006 - Version 1.6 works with IE7 RC1. Grab it here.
7/26/2006 - Version 1.5 works with IE7 Beta 3, but requires a few more files so I've bundled it into a zip file for distribution. Grab it here.
6/29/2006 - This isn't working with IE7 Beta 3 yet. I'll have to test it out more and probably release a new version.
2/8/2006 - Version 1.4 temporarily updates the IE version to work with conditional statements (<!--[if lt IE 7.0]>) based on a recommendation by Thomas Meinike. 3/21/2006 - This build has been tested with the IE7 B2 Preview released on 3/20/2006. It works, in that it allowed me to browse sites in IE7 without messing up IE6 or my default browser association. However, I noticed high CPU usage while browsing and had to close IE7 using the task manager when I was through - it didn't respond to that little red X thing. I believe these are minor inconveniences compared to running a separate virtual machine just to check how a site looks. Obviously, this build of IE7 just came out yesterday so I haven't put this through rigorous testing.
2/2/2006 - Version 1.3 works with IE7 Beta 2 Preview.
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Farewell to IE Mac and a checkup on my IE recommendations from June 2004
I'm glad to see IE5 for Mac being mercy killed. It was a decent browser when it was released, but was condemned to a hideous undead state when development pretty much halted back in 2001. There never was an IE6 for Mac, and Mac IE5 is a pain to support. This may cause some short term problems for Mac users who use (poorly written) sites that are IE specific, but Mac IE5 is not a modern browser and it's time for us to move on. Did we plan to keep using IE5 forever?
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[OT] GMail Mobile is finally here
I've been waiting for this one for a while - GMail finally has a mobile version at http://m.gmail.com. I've occasionally used Pocket Gmail, but Gmail Mobile is a lot smoother. Just in time for vacation, too.
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[code] MapPoint - CSS Uploads with Zip and Chunking
The Microsoft MapPoint Web Service allow for uploading location data in XML following the Access 2003 XML format. The Customer Data Service limits uploads to 1MB chunks, but it allows the XML to be zip compressed. That's nice because zipping XML can cut the file size by up to 90%.
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DOS batch script to restore a SQL 2000 database and grant permission to ASPNET account
I've found the most reliable method of moving SQL Server databases between servers is a simple backup / restore. The restore is a bit of a pain in the neck, though - it takes some unnecessary clicky clicky in the SQL Server Enterprise Manager (ugh).
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The software market doesn't reward security, it just punishes perceived insecurity
Random thought: The market hasn't rewarded Microsoft's recent security initiatives (W2K3, XPSP2 etc.). Microsoft pumped a ton of development (read money) into their recent security efforts, which dramatically reduced their attack surfaces. That's a good long term move, but I don't think it paid off in immediate sales. I can say from my personal experience that administrators talk about the improved security they're getting when they install W2K3 for other reasons, but no one moves to W2K3 to get secure.
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[tip] localhost vs. (local) in SQL Server connection strings
Sample code with SQL Server connection strings often use localhost and (local) interchangeably. They're different.
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[tool] DiffDoc - Show differences between Word documents (and PDF, XLS, PPT, RTF..)
I just read about DiffDoc on Buck Hodges' blog. This thing's amazing - it shows differences between all sorts of businessy document formats - MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Wordperfect, PDF, RTF, and HTML -
[fix] Killing the F-Lock on MS Keyboards (even under USB)
None of the normal hacks to disable the F-Lock key on Microsoft keyboards work if you're connected via USB. The XML file at the end of this post corrects it.
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[tip] (Re)installing Windows on a SATA drive
I recently bought a Dell Dimension 9100, mainly due to the 24" LCD bundle. I blew out whatever goofiness had been preinstalled and went to intall Windows XP SP2. Well, it has a SATA drive and Windows still doesn't include SATA drivers.
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[wish] Windows MCE TV / Video Playlists
I'll confess - my kids watch the occasional TV show. At least with our Windows MCE setup, they watch shows my wife and I preselect instead of whatever happens to be on at the time, but that brings with it the annoyance of having to change the shows when each one ends.
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3D Pie Chart
Here's a nice free3D Pie Chart class on CodeProject. Version 1.4 (just released) includes some bug fixes and a demo app. Purty.
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[FIX] BizTalk 2004 - Failed to generate the master secret (error code 0X80070005)
The BizTalk Server 2004 installation fails on XP SP2 with an error message that doesn't give much of a clue as to what the problem is: Failed to generate the master secret (error code 0X80070005). As Marco says in his post, it's easy enough to Google it if you know that XP SP2 caused the problem, but otherwise it's not easy to figure out.
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[tip] Use the Coral Distribution Network to save bandwidwidth
A family member called me about the bandwidth on his site due to MP3 downloads lately. The host company said there had been 40GB of downloads this past month, which required extra fees since the hosting plan doesn't allow for near that bandwidth. I changed the offending MP3 links to use the (free) Coral Distribution Network , and thought it would be good to share the information on this service since it's bailed me out more than a few times.
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[OT] 300th post
Well, hey, look at that! This is my 300th post. Hooray for multiples of 100!
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Best free VistaDB post - "If VistaDB was a woman... I'd marry it."
...or rather... if VistaDB was a woman... and I wasn't already married... and I was into chicks who were thread-safe and crash-safe.... then I'd marry...
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NSurvey goes 2.0, shifts to mixed license model
NSurvey V2.0 is finally available along with new licensing terms from the member section. A a FREE community license is still available for small to mid size surveys.
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E4X - XLINQ in Javascript, but when?
With all the AJAX / Web 2.0 hype lately, I've been thinking about what's next for Javascript (the J in AJAX - Asynchronous Javascript And XML), a.k.a. ECMAScript.
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[link] C# 1.1 Project Templates for VS 2005
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DotNetRocks San Diego Show
I saw the the DotNetRocks Roadtrip in San Diego Thursday night. It was a fun and informative time. Carl Franklin's info on VB.NET 2005 was interesting. Most of it was just general VS 2005 / CodeRush info, which was just great for me. Richard Campbell is a hilarious speaker and gave a great overview of the Windows Mobile platform and devices, which helped make some sense of a pretty disorganized space (Smartphone 2003, Smartphone 2003 SE, Windows Mobile 5, CDMA, GPRS, EDGE, etc.). I went home played with wrote VS2005 / Smartphone apps for my Audiovox SMT5600. Fun stuff.
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Let's get the Blog Worth thing out of our system
Here's the blog worth of every feed on the weblogs.asp.net OPML, with code included to keep it on topic (webrequest, xml, and regex). We can be done with this now.
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DevAge Source Pack 1.0.0.0 - SourceGrid 3 and more ...
I blogged about the DevAge Source Pack this past summer when it was in Beta 1. The DevAge Source Pack 1.0.0.0 has just been released now - download it and try out the demos.
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internet explorer tab within firefox
Great new extension for Firefox that opens an IE Tab. Comments indicate it may be a bit quirky, which shouldn't be surprising since it's kind of a hack. It's working great for me in Firefox 1.5. I just ran Windows Update with no problems. Of course you're really running IE embedded in a tab, but fewer open windows means less clutter on the screen and on the taskbar, which is all good news.
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Why not an Expression Query Language?
Regular Expressions are extremely powerful and ugly as all hell.[1] Even with comments and a good RegEx IDE like the Regulator , they're total gibberish. Why not a RegEx 2006 with a more readable syntax?
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"Firefox support - available soon!" means you're doing things the hard way
I am disappointed to see that Windows Live is not working right in Firefox.[1] Not because I'm all religious about browser support and all that, although Firefox has been my default browser for quite a while. I'm just as dismayed when I see sites that only support Firefox, Safari, or Lynx and say they're adding IE support soon...
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Windows Live - I think I get it...
Scott Hanselman's response to Windows Live: I just don't get it. That was my response today as I read about 50 different announcements on it. But after reading Dare's explanation, it starts to make a bit more sense:
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[quote] Play a Sony CD, Get a Rootkit Installed
Nice. Oddly enough, you may be safer with illegally copied music. I stopped buying music from online stores due to DRM restrictions preventing copies to more than 3 computers. I've got 5 CPU's just in my house right now.
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Firefox Web Developer Extension Beta 0.9.9
I recently upgraded to Firefox 1.5 B2. It's been working great, except the Web Developer Extension stopped working - it showed it was installed, but the toolbar and menu item were disabled. Fortunately, Chris just released a new beta of the Web Developer Extension that works great with Firefox 1.5 and has a ton of new features to boot . Yippee!
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[link] Connection String generation Visual Studio macro
Speaking of useful macros, this is one I've used for a a few years and thought might be usefull. It calls the ADODB Data Link Properties dialog (shown below). After you go through the dialog picking your data source, database, and connection settings, it dumps out the connection string for your configuration into code window where your cursor is located.
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[wish] Microsoft P2P download system
Visual Studio 2005, .NET Framework 2.0, and SQL Server 2005 release to MSDN today, and so of course MSDN downloads got hit pretty hard this morning. After a shaky start, the download speeds appear to be picking up.
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[tool] MozBackup - copy your Firefox profiles
I'm setting up a new dev computer and used MozBackup to migrate all my Firefox extensions. It goes better than that - it also supports copying the extension settings, saved passwords, history, and a bunch of other stuff[1]. It was kind of spooky when I restored it on my new computer and (since I'm using the SessionSaver extension) seeing all my tabs restored exactly like the old computer.
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ASP.NET DropDownLists with day / month / year values
I recently had to add date selection dropdowns on a webform and was surprised that a few minutes of Googling didn't write my code for me. I wrote a quick console app to do it. Here's the code, along with dropdowns for month, day, and year.
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GMail: "oops...the system was unable to perform your operation"
I've been using GMail as my primary e-mail for the past month, and it's worked pretty well. Searching e-mail is nice, the tagging features are helpful (for instance, I added a tag for a client which automatically includes every e-mail which contains contains their domain name), and it integrates well with the Google personalized desktop.
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The hidden feature in Media Center 2005 UR2
MCE 2005 Update Rollup 2 includes support for DVD changers. "But", you say, "I don't own a DVD changer." Yeah, me neither. What's cool is that you can very easily use this feature on DVD image files stored on your hard drive.
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//TODONT: Use a Windows Service just to run a scheduled process
A common requirement in business application is a scheduled process - call a webservice, process the data, and FTP the results to a business partner, for instance. Developers kick around possible solutions - BizTalk's overkill, DTS won't handle it well, what to do?
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Yet another command line parsing system
First Mike has linked to a command line parser library for .NET called Param.NET. Then Roy proposeda better command line parsing class which is attribute based. So, now's the time to mention a command line parameter class that worked well for me recently.
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Transparency on DRM and Windows Mobile upgrades
I've really appreciated a few recent posts from Microsoft developers on the practical reasons behind some frustrating restrictions on Microsoft products - DRM and the inability to upgrade some Windows Mobile 2003 devices to Windows Mobile 5.
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[link] Riya - Photo search with face recognition
I've been looking for this exact product for a few years now:
Riya is a free photo search service built around facial recognition. Sure, they support searching based on who's in the picture, but they've taken it further than that by treating the faces as people with identities and e-mail addresses. If I upload a picture of you, it'll show up in your searches[1]. That's cool! -
Installing Windows Vista October CTP (Build 5231) on VPC with VM Additions
I installed the Windows Vista October CTP (Build 5231) on Virtual PC yesterday. There were a few gotchas that I thought I'd share in case it saves anyone else some time.
- Virtual PC can't capture an ISO image greater than 2.2 GB, so you need to use something like Daemon Tools on your host machine to mount the ISO as a virtual drive, then capture it as a physical drive in VPC.
- Vista won't install on a RAW partition, which is what an unformatted VPC Virtual Hard Drive (VHD) image gives you. You can do some tricky commandline DISKPART stunts, or you can just create the partition in the install process knowing that Vista still won't like it, reboot the VPC instance, and this time VPC will recognize the partition it created. I went with the second option.
- This Vista build can't access Windows Update. You just get a message saying you need to use Automatic Updates and tells you how to set that up. Knowing that unpatched machines on the net can get haxxor'd in 20 minutes on average, I set the Auto Update time to the next hour and disabled the VPC network connection until that time. Silly me, there weren't any Auto Updates since it had just been released, but I still think minimizing Internet time before patching a machine is the best plan.
- The VPC VM Additions Installation hangs on this Vista build, and the graphics are absolute hell without them (640x480 at 8 bit, I believe). The trick is as follows: leave the hung installation running, go into the Control Panel and remove the VGA Display Driver, and say Okay when prompted to reboot. When the system comes back up, you'll have the state of the art S3 Trio display driver. It got wiggy on me when I tried to change the Display Resolution, so I rebooted again and was able to change the resolution and things were great. Dog slow, but great. If you cancel the install or kill the wrong msiexec process, the install rolls back and the drivers get removed, causing the magic not to happen.
- I kind of lied about the VM Additions. The video drivers are installed, and they make a big difference, but the rest of the VM Additions aren't installed. That means no folder sharing, etc. They might release VM Additions for Vista Beta 1, but I'm not holding my breath.
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How exactly would you like me to "Quote values differently inside a '<% ... "value" ... %>' block"?
Visual Studio freaks out when your HTML contains nested quotes. Roy's solution (using single quotes for the attribute and double quotes for the databinder or function arguments) works unless you need to nest quotes, which occurs if you're including a Javascript call in a databinding statement:
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[link] Connecting to Terminal Services When All Active Sessions are Used
Here's a little trick for getting into a box via Terminal Server when all sessions are in use. Phil and I came up with it yesterday and I was going to write it up, but he beat me to it with a pretty nice writeup. Here it is:
We use Remote Desktop (Terminal Services) to remotely manage a Windows 2003 server that is not part of our domain. Recently we ran into the two user limit for remote desktop connections, which barred anyone from connecting. Jon discovered a neat little trick that got us in. He ran the following command from the command line: mstsc -console It turns out that mstsc.exe is the remote desktop connection application. The -console flag specifies that we want to connect to the console session of a server. Since we generally launch Remote Desktop from the icon, we almost always leave this console session free. Nice! ... [via haacked - Connecting to Terminal Services When All Active Sessions are Used]
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[OT] Friday afternoon silliness
New video from Jason Forrest - War Photographer
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BizTalk is to Windows Workflow Foundation as...
Nice to see this spelled out.
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[links] Recent links of interest - 10/8/2005
Here are some interesting links from the past month or so. Some of these will be old news if you read all the .NET blogs; some of my readers don't.
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[OT] Web 1.0 Summit - Anyone else going to the <blink> tag session?
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Uninstall a Previous Application When Upgrading an Application with Setups Created in VS.NET
Source: Uninstall a Previous Application When Upgrading an Application with Setups Created in VS.NET
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Office 12 will have Native PDF support (or, rather, no...)
Steven Sinofsky (SVP, Office) announced Saturday that Office 12 will have native PDF support.
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[OT] Why not nuke the hurricanes?
During the recent hurricanes, there were several blog posts about the StormFury project which investigated "hurricane modification" by seeding clouds to lessen their impact. It didn't pan out.
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[asp.net] Simple utility function to return all selected values from a CheckBoxList
The ASP.NET CheckBoxList.SelectedValue property only returns first item selected. The MSDN solution is ugly - iterate the CBL items checking each one to see if it's selected.
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JavaScript only pretends to support function overloading
I frequently use method overloading a lot in my C# code to allow optional parameters, so when I wanted to implement a simple popup function with optional support for virtual root and website based on the url, here's what I came up with:
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Splitting Camel Case with RegEx
Phil posted some code to Split Pascal/Camel Cased Strings a few days ago. We had an offline discussion on doing this via RegEx.
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[Fix] View Style Information disabled on Firefox Web Developer Toolbar
Some of the tools in the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar extension require that you install Firefox with the Developer's Tools option. If the "View Style Information" menu option is disabled this means the Dom Inspector is not installed.
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From/Select and Select/From in LINQ
I'd been wondering about the FROM/WHERE/SELECT syntax in DLINQ. I'm used to the SQL SELECT/FROM/WHERE approach. Turns out that I'm late to this party - this was (of course) discussed at the PDC, and has been under some discussion since then.
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[link] TransferBigFiles.com
TransferBigFiles.com makes it easy to send files that are way to big for e-mail - up to 1GB. You upload the file(s) via their website and enter the recipient's e-mail (and some optional things, like a password). The recipient gets an e-mail with a download link and has five days to pick it up. It's a free service from the good folks at Axosoft.
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[fix] IIS Unexpected error 0x8ffe2740 occurred - Skype on Port 80
"Unexpected error 0x8ffe2740 occurred" is not a particularly helpful error message. It just means IIS can't start a website because port 80 is already in use.
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[Fun] SomePreparedRemarks.com
Eric Lawrence (the evil genius behind Microsoft Fiddler) links to SomePreparedRemarks. These are pretty durn funny.
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[tool] Make Property / Refactoring Plug-in for VS.NET
DPack's "Surround With" feature is great, but the "property" function just writes out a template. Since VS2005 will include this feature, it probably won't make it into DPack (http://www.usysware.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=36).
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[tool] GIF Plug-in for Cropper 1.6
Cropper is one of the my most used utilities. It's a lightweight screenshot application that's easy to use, unobtrusive, and free. It's never supported GIF output, though. I actually hacked together a working but ugly GIF output option about a year ago, but it never made the official release.
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Avoiding DataBinder.Eval in ASP.NET
I've used this tip at least thrice, so following Phil's "Rule of Three" it's time to do something with it. Link to it now, I shall.
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LINQ looks good, but DLINQ scares me
One of Microsoft's announcements at the PDC this week has been LINQ (Language INtegrated Query). Here's the elevator speech version: "LINQ enables developers to query objects, databases and XML using a unified programming model because LINQ makes data transforms and queries first class NET citizens."
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Fun with Generics - Currying
Sriram writes about aninteresting use of C# 2.0 Generics to implement "Currying," a technique which is normally reserved for functional programming languages.
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[OT] Going independent
Tomorrow's my last day in a big corporate IT shop. I'm going independent to join forces with Phil Haack (Haacked) and Micah Dylan of Veloc-IT.
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PDC Wanna-be 2005
Not going to PDC, but San Diego is close enough that I can drive up for some evening events once or twice. I'm planning to go to two events Tuesday (9/13) - a secret "underground" event and the Mono meeting.
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IE Toolbar that's kind of like the Firefox Web Developer Extension
If you're a diehard Internet Explorer user, you might not know how great the Firefox Web Developer Extension is. This IE Toolbar isn't as good, but it's still pretty cool.
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High-Resolution Image Printing
A cool solution to a common web design problem - how to make an web images print well.
A List Apart - High-Resolution Image Printing -
A Google Maps .Net Control
Bill Pierce created an ASP.NET Server Control wrapper for the Google Maps API. He's posted the first of three articles on Code Project: Lat Lays Flat - Part 1 : A Google Maps .Net Control
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GroupBar Prototype from Microsoft Research
A recent post about Microsoft Scalable Fabric prompted me to browse through the MS Research Download page, where I ran across GroupBar [download]:
"GroupBar is a prototype for demonstrating the use of window-grouping features in an XP TaskBar-like interface. The window tiles in the GroupBar can be rearranged in any order or dragged and dropped into lightweight "groups" that allow one-click task-switching and convenient group operations." -
Free Opera license (until 12 AM PDT August 31)
I'm not an Opera user, but for it's nice to have a copy on hand for testing. Opera's giving away free licenses to celebrate their 10th birthday:
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Monoppix 1.1.8 - New Release
Monoppix 1.1.8 is live!
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TagCloud - Automated Folksonomy generation from RSS feeds
TagCloud is an automated Folksonomy tool. Essentially, TagCloud searches any number of RSS feeds you specify, extracts keywords from the content and lists them according to prevalence within the RSS feeds. Clicking on the tag's link will display a list of all the article abstracts associated with that keyword. TagCloud lets you create and manage clouds with content you are interested in, and lets you publish them on your own website.
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How to run IE7 (Beta 1) alongside IE6
UPDATE:
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Random idea: Using MIDI for WAV file compression
Since even mobile devices now have basic General MIDI support now, what about approximating digital audio as a stream of very short MIDI notes?
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Wish: Subscription Abstraction Layer
RSS.NET and Atom.NET[1] are great, but they sure could use an abstraction layer. I'll bet the same conditional logic has been written hundreds of times, but I haven't found anywhere that it's been abstracted out as a standalone library. Think ADO.NET - it's a general data access framework that allows any data provider (SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, Text, write your own) to be accessed as generic interfaces (IDataReader, etc.).
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isIE=document.all; //only kind of true
Internet Explorer 4 used document.all['elementName'] to refer to document elements while waiting for the W3C standard, which turned out to be document.getElementById('elementName'). IE 5 and above, plus all other modern standards based browsers, all support document.getElementByID(). IE 4 usage was below .5% in 2002 and isn't even being tracked anymore, so there's no good reason to be using document.all anymore.
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[OT] Torture Tapes podcast feed
I was looking around for the Most Unwanted Song since I seem to have lost my copy. This song was scientifically designed to be liked by "fewer than 200 individuals of the world's total population", and oddly enough I'm one of them. They conducted surveys on least liked themes and instrumentation, then comissioned a song full of rapping over tubas, operatic interludes about the cowboy life, and children's choirs singing about politics, religion, holidays, and advertising. Wonderful.
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OpenNetCF - Smart Device Framework
Heard about the OpenNetCF Smart Device Framework on Wally McClure's ASP.NET Podcast. It's a shared source framework that "enriches and extends the .NET Compact Framework by providing a rich set of classes and controls not available in the .NET Compact Framework."
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How to Speed up RSSBandit (while waiting for the Nightcrawler release)
RSSBandit is a great RSS Aggregator, but it's just about unusable with over 1000 feeds. CPU use goes through the roof, and it's got some GDI leaks. It runs, but the computer's not very usable. I've been starting it up every few days and setting the process priority to "Below Normal" in the Task Manager, but it's enough of a pain that I've just been browsing to a few pages in a browser (shudder) and ignoring the other feeds.
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RSS.NET - new build
RSS.NET is an open source class library which reads and writes RSS reeds. The project is still technically in beta and has never officially released a build, but a lot of applications are using it. I've been using it for a while and am very happy with it, but it has been a little disappointing to see this project linger in beta limbo for a few years now.
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New blog by Roiy, creator of Monoppix
Roiy, the brains behind the Monoppix project, just started a blog. His first post covers Sending E-Mails With Embedded Images and an overview of the DotNet Open Mail Library project.
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MSDN Subscriptions - Visual Studio 2005 Team System Beta 2 VPC
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[OT] Sufjan Stevens gets the ToString treatment
My good friend Sufjan just released another brilliant album, Illinoise, as the second installment of his 50 States project. Not surprisingly, it's been very well received. It was a very unexpected honor to be asked to remix one of the best songs on the album, Chicago, for an iTunes only release.[1] -
[OT] Why the name JonGalloway.ToString()?
Why is my blog titled JonGalloway.ToString()? I've had several non-nerds ask me that recently, so here it is:
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We need an Embedded Database for .NET applications
No, I'm not talking about Jet / Access. Microsoft and the general development community are moving away from it; plus, the MDAC redistributable is kinda big.
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SQLite - Database is locked
Summary:SQLite is a great, free, embedable database. It's fast, tiny, and reliable, and has some cool features like support for NTFS compression of the database file. It's multithreaded, but its coarse locking can be a problem.
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Cool free Winform control - PureComponents NicePanel
PureComponents NicePanel is free with registration. Includes a lot of nice design elements for data entry forms, including:
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DevAge Source Pack - Beta 1
DevAge's SourceGrid 2.0 is a great control - full featured, extensible, and some advanced features like virtualization and compact framework support. Unlike many Winform controls, this isn't just a .NET wrapper over a Windows Common Control - it's a new control, written entirely in C#.
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XStream.NET - Transparent XML Serialization
XStream.NET provides transparent XML object serialization. Unlike default XmlSerializer, XStream doesn't require any additional metadata (attributes) and could be used with any object.
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[tip] How to Perform a Win XP Repair Install
Good info here on performing a Windows XP Repair Install, including some tips on what to do if the repair option isn't available. The bootcfg /rebuild tip worked for me.
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Your system has no paging file...
My computer crashed hard a week ago. I repaired the Windows install, but since then I've been getting the following message when any of the three interactive users logs on:
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[tip] Using IE when it's not your default browser
Firefox has been my default browser for nearly a year, but there are a few sites that I have to use that use IE specific HTML. A usual offender is corporate intranets, since they've got a captive audiance.
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Monoppix 1.0.6 Release
Monoppix is a bootable Linux CD that runs .NET applications on the Mono framework. It makes it easy to see your .NET code running on Linux without installing a thing.
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Supersize my Windows Media Library
Steve's got a great idea here:
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Avalon and Indigo Beta SDK Now Available
From the main download page for the Betas, you will find a link to the updated SDK (iso format). Looks like Friday's announcement kinda jumped the gun, but it's all available now.
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.Math Expression Compiler
Welcome to .Math, the OpenSource expression compiler for the .NET platform written entirely in C#. Offering speed through compilation of expressions, the library allows for variable handling, an entire function library and the ability to add your own functions.
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Issue with Firefox v1.0.3 upgrade - blank screens
Hmm... this is a bit circular. Don and I both had problems with our Firefox extensions when we upgraded to 1.0.3 - every page we browsed to was blank. I figured out the solution, Don blogged it, so I'm just going to quote him:
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[link] Rewriting the URL using IHttpHandlerFactory
Don Good told me about Jeff Putz's cool article on Rewriting the URL using IHttpHandlerFactory. I don't know how I missed that one. It's a great technique that gets around all the grimy hacks you need if you're doing this the standard way, using HttpContext.Current.RewritePath(someFile). This one instead maps a custom handler for ASPX files to your class which implements IHttpHandlerFactory. Then in the code logic, you just load the code from the physical ASPX file instead of redirecting to it and screwing with your context:
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An overview of the Enterprise Library
We've been looking for some standard components in my group at work. The main issues were logging, data access, and centralized configuration. We'd kicked the tires on the Enterprise Library a bit, but our reaction was the standard "Gee, it looks complicated. Probably more trouble than it's worth." Then within one week, we got a barrage of EntLib information: a presentation by Scott Mitchell at the local San Diego .NET user group, presentations by Tom Hollander and Blake Dong (Avenade) at the Microsoft San Diego Architect Council, and an onsite Q & A with Tom Hollander. It all made sense: this is exactly what we were looking for, and it might be worth a second look if you'd decided to pass on it, too.
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[VPC] Compressing VHD files
As mentioned some time ago, we're shuttling VHD files around the office to share preconfigured developer environments. Even precompacted, VHD files are still pretty huge - 5 to 10 GB. They can compress down quite a bit, though - as much as 70% or so.
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[VPC] Using Virtual PC for developer portability
I've been using VPC quite a bit lately. At work, we've got a few applications which can take days to get set up for development - one app is ASP.NET mixed with VB DCOM on DB2, another is even more confusing. Both take a few days to configure, and that's if you follow the directions and ask the guys who built it. That kills developer portability - a 30 minute bug fix becomes a 30 hour bug fix if the developer hasn't gone through the installation initiatiation on that system yet.
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Free Opera Browser v7.54 License
It's nice to test drive the top alternative browsers, especially if you're involved in web development and want to see how your sites are displayed. I've never used Opera before because I'm terminally cheap and very happy with Firefox.
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[OT] Teaching a child to read
I'm teaching my 4 year old, Rosemary how to read. I thought I'd share a few of my experiences in case it's helpful to others.
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Hiding that "Server Application Unavailable" error message - Answered
Time's up, pencils down.
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ASP.NET 1.1 database cache dependency (without triggers)
Here's a way to implement a database cache dependency in an ASP.NET 1.1 application. At a high level, it uses a timer on a background thread (in an HTTP Module) that checksums database tables. No database triggers are required.
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[OT] Let's crank this blog back up
Hmmm... no posts for more than a month. A reorg at work got me a small promotion and a ton more work. Bunch of other non-computer related stuff.
Enough of the bloguilt - let's crank this sucker back up. Got 275 notes on blog post topics and several code samples that are just about complete, so here goes...
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TriOS - Object Oriented Operating System
Stumbled across this today - TriOS is a proposed operating system that is completely based on objects at all levels. Files, users, etc., are all objects that are persisted to disk on shutdown.
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Graphical BitTorrent simulator
If you think BitTorrent is about pirating music, you're missing out on a really cool emerging distribution system1. Carl Franklin uses BitTorrent to distribute DotNetRocks. We've used it on the Monoppix project2 to distribute over 1.7TB in 12 days on a $5/month hosting package (there are 620 downloads of a 445MB file in progress right now). It's an economical and efficient way to distribute large files.
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[util] DPack 2.0 - wow!
On Greg's say so, I tried out DPack 2.0. I don't know how I missed the 1.0 release, but I'm very impressed. This one is a keeper.
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[OT] Why do we buy books?
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[asp.net] Popup Tester Web Control
This is a great idea - an ASP.NET server control that only shows if popups are blocked. Use it to show a warning message, info on how to disable popup blocking for your site, or the information you would have shown in the popup if it was allowed.
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[tools] Monoppix 1.0 is out
Monoppix 1.0 has been released! Our new website, www.monoppix.com is live! Help wanted!
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[help?] ISO mirroring / torrent for Monoppix 1.0 release
We're just about ready to release Monoppix 1.0 (Linux LiveCD with Mono, MySQL, Monodevelop, etc.).
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[OT] Animated short film - Ryan
No way for this meme to become tired. You will need time and bandwidth to see these animated shorts.
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[firefox] Pass on the 1.0.1 release
Mozilla Foundation Announces Update to Firefox - 1.0.1 is out for you Firefox users.
[Source: The Daily Grind 567] -
[tip] Knoppix cheat code for Virtual PC Video
Summary
Enter this "cheat code" at the initial startup prompt when using Knoppix based Linux Live CD's under Virtual PC:
knoppix xserver=XFree86 xmodule=s3 depth= 16 -
[ASP.NET] Scaleout Server - Distributed in-memory ASP.NET session state
Most server-farm applications store fast-changing workload data, such as ASP.NET session-state, in a centralized, back-end database. A new software product, called ScaleOut StateServer , improves performance by hosting session-state directly on the farm using distributed, in-memory storage.
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[code] ASP.NET Busy Box 1.2 (Processing... Please Wait)
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[code] How to create a splash screen for your application
Cool code from David Kean to add a professional looking Splash Screen for a .NET Winform app:
How to create a splash screen for your application -
Favorite .NET linkblogs
When work or family interfere with my information addiction (I'm up to 1594 RSS feeds now [update: see comment below]), I rely on a crack team of linkbloggers to keep me caught up until I can slog through the thousands of unread posts:
http://www.larkware.com/
http://coolthingoftheday.blogspot.com
http://odetocode.com/Blogs/otcnews/
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ (not technically a linkblog, but he usually catches all the best stuff)
[update: http://www.theserverside.net/rss/index.tss is also pretty helpful, although I don't read it daily if I'm short on time]
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A term for those cool new Google Apps: Ajax
Darren points to a cool article from Adaptive Path that gives a new term for the cool apps Google has been building lately: Ajax (Asynchronous Javascript and XML).
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[link] CSS Based Dropdown Menus (updated)
Scott's articleAn Easier Way to Highlight the Rows of a DataGrid on MouseOver included a link to an old ALA article on the
Suckerfish Dropdown[updated] - see the improved Son of Suckerfish Dropdown! -
Joel got it wrong - Why learning C is a waste of your college time and money
Back in January, Joel Spoelsky wrote a Career Advice column. It gave some generally good advice to college students, the main points being:
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[utils] Strings in binaries - strings.exe
A while ago, I was searching through IIS DLL's looking for a specific error message. Like most things, there's my way and the easy way.
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Unofficial Firefox 1.1 changelog
Unofficial Firefox 1.1 changelog
Full Firefox 1.1 release plan on the Firefox Wiki
Firefox 1.1 (Preview Release) scheduled for April 2005
Firefox 1.1 Release scheduled for June 2005
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[wish] "CREATE TABLE ... LIKE" in SQL Server 2005
My friend Dave recently told me about the "CREATE TABLE ... LIKE " SQL statement. MySql and DB2 both support it, and it's apparently part of the SQL99 spec. It's not supported by T-SQL (SQL Server).
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Tracing Enhancement in ASP.NET 2.0 - MostRecent
Back in June 2003 I posted a wish for wrapping in ASP.NET the Trace stack:
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LogParser and WMI: separated at birth?
LogParser: a cool tool that supports SQL-like queries against "text-based data such as log files, XML files and CSV files, as well as key data sources on the Windows® operating system such as the Event Log, the Registry, the file system, and Active Directory®." [via MSDN]
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[tip] Use WinMerge for compare / merge in StarTeam
We use StarTeam for source control at my work. I'm not a huge StarTeam fan, and I think the compare / merge portion is pretty much unusable. Fortunately, you can pick your own alternative merge and compare utilities. I like WinMerge . Here's how to set it up:
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[tools] Log Parser 2.2 is out
Log Parser 2.2 is out (via Bernard at Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0\r\n). Download it [here]. If you aren't familiar with Log Parser, check out www.logparser.com.
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[sql] T-SQL Quiz
A user executes the following two queries in SQL Server Query Analyzer. Query 1 returns no rows; Query 2 returns one row. Why?
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[OT] Horses and monkeys
Yesterday evening I wanted to take a quick catnap after dinner. That's not too easy with a 1 year old and a 3 year old who want to play with Dada, but I can sometimes get away with it if I convince them we're playing.
"I'm going to play 'nap on the couch' now. I'm the little baby and you can put me to sleep."
"What will you dream about?" Rosemary, the three year old, asked.
"Um... horsies and monkeys and that kind of stuff," I mumbled as I drifted off.
I woke up about 10 minutes later. I learned to appreciate even tiny doses of sleep when I was in the military.
Rosemary was standing a foot away from me, smiling. "Did your dreams come true?" she asked.
"Um... I don't know... uh..." I was groggy. I rarely remember my dreams, and usually when I do they're utter nonsense. How to answer this one?
"Wait a second, Dada." She scurried out of the room. I glanced around and noticed I was surrounded by a huge pile of stuffed horses - she'd obviously been gathering and arranging them the whole time I slept. When did we get so many stuffed horses? Rosemary returned with her only stuffed monkey, a tiny little sock monkey.
"Did your dreams come true, Dada?" She asked again, expectantly.
Yes, sweet little girl. My dreams have come true. -
New Google tag... rel="nofollow"?
Scoble mentioned this morning that Google would be announcing a new tag today, so I've been keeping my eyes peeled. Anne van Kesteren just blogged about it - it looks like it's rel="nofollow".
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[OT] Half-Life back story, mods
I'm a fan of the Half-Life thing. I stink at it - unlike my little brother who finished it 4 days after it was released and is now literally lapping me, I'm still slogging through. I play for the love of the game, though, and because I really enjoy the storyline.
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[fyi] Known bug in RSSBandit 1.3 Alpha - OPML Import
Managing a big feed list is a pain in the neck. The weblogs.asp.net group feed continues to add new posters (good), but the only mechanism I've found to add them in RSSBandit (or any of the other aggregators I've used) is to
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[link] How to Script SQL Server User and Role Object Permissions
I needed to copy user permissions between two SQL Server environments; this script did the trick: http://www.sql-server-performance.com/bm_object_permission_scripts.asp
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Patches and Reboots
Alex Campbell talks about the pain of keeping servers patched since most patches seem to still require reboots:Web Hosting Nightmare - Windows Update
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[tool] w.bloggar - Version 4.00 Released!
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[update] URL's with offsets - deep links in audio files
I previously posted [URL's with offsets - www.sample.com/interview.mp3#time=32:05] about how I thought it would be very useful to link to a specific portion of an audio resource. As podcasts get bigger, I see that as a huge usability feature.
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[OT] Riddle Me This, Google, Part Three
Eric Lippert has posted his third installment of answers to Google queries that seemed to have reached his blog in error. No matter, Eric Explains It All:Riddle Me This, Google, Part Three
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[wish] Community code namespace standards
I'm happy to see the huge growth of community contributed code - things like RSS.NET, sharpziplib, ftp classes to tide us over 'til .NET 2.0, etc.
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[link] mFeeds - Podcast feeds from any page with media links
I got a 30GB MP3 player for Christmas so this Podcasting thing is getting more interesting to me. I'd previously wanted a Podcast feed from the Pitchfork Media MP3 page. I'd even started building an application to build the RSS for me based on Roy Osherove's Site-To-RSS code.
