VisualC - Duncan Mackenzie .NET

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.

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.

Ok, cool plug-ins for Windows Live Writer cropping up all over

2006-09-07T04:39:00

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 check out. Of course, if you have no idea what Windows Live Writer is... check out this video from on10.net :)

Source Code formatting/coloring (colouring!) for your ASP.NET web site

2006-09-07T04:39:00

Kent points us to a free ASP.NET control that pretties up any source code you output to your site... most systems I've used convert the code into html, but this one lets you leave it in its proper form (for downloading or copying to the user's clipboard) and does the coloring at runtime.

Hiding files inside a zip...

2006-09-07T04:38:00

Cool article on Code Project shows how you can have additional files in a .zip file that normal extraction programs like WinZip will not extract or list.

Steganography 16 - Hiding additional files in a ZIP archive

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!

Term Extraction

2006-09-07T04:37:00

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.

Code is available for download here: Term Extraction (ZIP).

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.

More on that RSS editor...

2006-09-07T04:36:00

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 are more features coming, and I'm revamping the style and behavior of the category system.... but you can try it out against copies of your own feeds or click File | New Feed to make new ones. Check out the Validate option on the menu, it will send whatever feed you have open to a web service enabled version of the feedvalidator.org system (coded up by Kent Sharkey), allowing you to check the validatity of your RSS without having to publish the file anywhere.

Note: If you have Beta 2 of the .NET Framework installed, the Click Once application will not install or run correctly. In this case, you need to run the VS remove tool (available from here)

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 :)

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.

Following in Kent's footsteps, like usual :)

2006-09-07T04:35:00

Kent's flair was cool... so I made my own, using his code of course, but targetting whatever feed you want... check out the source of this image and I'm sure you can figure out how to change the feed it is pointing to...

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.

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...

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...

Windows Media Player and Visual Studio .NET.... anyone else notice any interaction?

2006-09-07T04:34:00

Ok, this may seem really odd, but I swear it happened to me... :)

Yesterday I decided that I would hook up my headphones and listen to some music at work. I do this all the time at home, but not often in the office. I fired up media player on my laptop and started playing a variety of ripped WMA files. Then I opened up VS.NET 2003 and a fairly large project. I immediately got a bunch of errors about references and such, which was odd, since this project was working fine the last time I loaded it. I removed and re-added some references and managed to get rid of all the errors and then I tried to Build... the Build just hanged after awhile and wouldn't complete. VS was still completely responsive, so I just canceled the build and tried again... over and over again the build would just stop at the same point. I restarted VS, same problem... then I finally realized that I had seen this before, and it was because I was playing music. I closed WMP, tried to build.... worked perfectly. I switched to listening to music on my Rio Nitrus...

So before I bug someone on VS about this, has anyone else seen this sort of thing? I'm not sure if it is really to do with WMP, or if it just a high-CPU load background process... I have some fairly high-bitrate music and my laptop is not the fastest machine around (1 GHZ, with 1GB of RAM). This doesn't happen at all at home, but that is a 3.2 GHZ hyper threaded machine, so the difference in configuration could account for the different behaviour.

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.

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!

Pulling from MSDN... the code...

2006-09-07T04:33:00

(see this post for an introduction to this topic...)

I've wrapped my code up into a user control that you place anywhere on your page... it handles the load of data and then you can access its properties to output the html headers and body of the pulled content. I've just been using Output Caching on the host page, but if you decided to cache the body/headers that would certainly work as well...

Here is an example of using the control on a bare bones page...

<%@ Page Language="VB" Debug="true" %>
<%@ OutputCache Duration="360" VaryByParam="*" %>
<%@ Register TagPrefix="dm" TagName="Pull" Src="Pull.ascx" %>
<dm:Pull id=pagePull runat="server" 
 QueryParam="pullURL" 
 DefaultURL="http://msdn.microsoft.com"/>
<html>
 <head>
 <%=pagePull.PageHeaders%>
 </head>
 <body>
 <%=pagePull.PageBody%>
 </body>
</html>

This simple page and the ascx are bundled up into a .zip file available here

Playing around with pulling my articles into my own site's chrome...

2006-09-07T04:33:00

Check out my articles page, which is built from an RSS file by the way, and click on any of the "Coding 4 Fun" articles. You'll end up still in my site, but viewing the full MSDN article. Mostly I'm just playing around, but it seemed 'neat' enough to mention :)

By the way, the jury is still out on whether or not I've opened myself to various new security risks through this code, so if you want to try and hack my site using this new "pull" concept, go for it... I'd really appreciate it if you'd let me know if you find anything though, in the interest of science that is :)

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.

Gratis needs to update their banners :)

2006-09-07T04:32:00

Gratis, the company behind the various www.free***.com sites (and the original free iPod folks), provide banners for use on sites like mine, but they don't really keep them up to date. For example, the banner for the Free PC site is all about the Dell machine you can get, but they recently added a Sony Vaio as a possible choice. Now, I'm not sure why, since its specs are not that different from the Dell, but the Sony machine just seems more appealing :) ... here is Gratis's blurb on the new box:

Got a digital lifestyle? Well, www.FreeDesktopPC.com is about to make your life a whole lot easier! We're now offering Sony's brand new Vaio computer, loaded with multimedia software to help digitize all parts of your life. It comes bundled with "Click to DVD Software" that allows you to take those dusty VHS tapes and 8mm camcorder cassettes and transfer them right to DVD. The Vaio burns DVD+R dual layer discs for up to 8.5 GB of storage, and the PC itself has an amazingly huge 80 GB HD! Check it out, and go get yours at www.FreeDeskTopPC.com

What about you, what PC manufacturer do you prefer? I have two Dells at home, another Dell at work, and a Compaq/HP laptop... I'm pretty happy with the Dell boxes (which is why I bought my last home machine in 99, and then another Dell this year) although I've heard that their power supplies use a different pin configuration than 'standard', which has prevented me from replacing my power supply with a quiet one ... actually I have no idea if that rumour is true, but it has meant that I need to do some research before I can buy a new PSU so it is has caused me to delay that purchase for about a year!

FWIW, the free flat screen site added a new monitor too, a 19" Sony... not a huge jump in specs over the 17" that they had, but still... 19" > 17" :)

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....

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.

Outlook Web Access team looking for developers...

2006-09-07T04:32:00

The Outlook Web Access team is looking for web developers
Web-based mail is hot. Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook Web Access... They're all making headlines and showing off the richness of the web. The Outlook Web Access team is looking for solid ASP.NET developers to help build our next version. We're looking for people with top-notch development skills, who have worked with C# and ASP.NET in the past and have a solid understanding of HTML, CSS and script. We're looking for people who want to take web applications to the next level of richness while also offering a blazing fast client.

via Kent Sharkey's blog

Another little .Text update...

2006-09-07T04:32:00

Thanks to a post by Nick Parker, I found out my blog site was not producing valid RSS... and now it is :)

Buy yourself a .NET Celebrity (and the $ is for a good cause)

2006-09-07T04:32:00

An A-List of .NET consultants, including my friend Joel Semeniuk amongst others, are auctioning themselves off on EBay... with the proceeds going towards disaster relief in Indonesia. Check out the details (and the full list of folks) here;

Added support for the rel="nofollow" attribute to my .Text installation...

2006-09-07T04:32:00

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.cs: namelink.Attributes["rel"] = "nofollow"; ... now, let's just hope it works ;)

I think I might enhance this a bit later, adding the idea of approved comments that don't get this attribute for their links, since I see no reason why a non-spammer's comment shouldn't give them google-juice. That feature is likely a ways into the future, but you never know.

Lead Developer position available with MSDN

2006-09-07T04:31:00

Just posted recently, there is a opening at MSDN for a "Software Development Engineering Lead". This is within the same group that I have just joined and it looks like a great job for the right person. Here is a brief snippet from the full job description....

Come leverage state-of-the-art technology! The MSDN/TechNet development team is looking for you to help us innovate in many exciting areas for our Development and IT Professional communities.

We are looking for seasoned Development Lead that can deliver and strategize our tooling for Content Management, Personalization, Rendering and Publishing efforts. This is highly collaborative position and you will be working closely with the teams that we depend on (for example the Assistance Platform and the Microsoft.com Platform teams) to integrate and couple our tools to a variety of backend systems and aggregating data sources.

We have a broad charter for content publishing, tooling and workflow applications for our core audiences and the broader areas of Microsoft.com and for all of our worldwide subsidiaries. We will highly value your expertise in areas of locale specific publishing, site personalization and content targeting. We want to improve the relevance of our content and site experiences for our customers by providing personalized and targeted content. Familiarity and experience with RSS, meta-data and taxonomies in relationship to application development will be important to this role.

For the full details and/or to submit a resume, follow this link.

Based on the response to past job postings, I'd like to be clear about one thing... do not submit your resume to me, do not post it in the comments to this blog entry ... either approach will basically be ignored (unless you are someone who knows me well enough that you are looking for a reference).

DataGrid programming...

2006-09-07T04:31:00

Customizing the data grid (in Windows Forms) was always one of the most popular topics on the C# or VB developer centers, so I'm sure a lot of people will be interested in this article. It is in C#, so far, but if you'd like to see it in VB I'd suggest you email the writer (email at the bottom of the article).

Styling with the DataGridColumnStyle, Part 1
Explains the rendering infrastructure of the Windows Forms DataGrid control, including the various resources that the DataGrid utilizes to display its data.

C# Blogs page has changed to be a bit more useful...

2006-09-07T04:30:00

This page used to contain blog postings that I manually selected out of the mass of posts by members of the C# team, but (as with most manual processes) that didn't scale as more and more team members posted more and more content.... today, as one of my tidy-up acts as the former owner of that site, I revamped the page to display an aggregated list of posts based off of an OPML file (using a cool ASP.NET control from Kent), so now it runs completely without any manual work. This is a good thing.

.NET Framework Code Coverage Edition

2006-09-07T04:30:00

A month or so ago, Adam Nathan annouced the release of the Code Coverage edition of the .NET Framework 2.0 (Beta 1)... but I was chatting with him recently and he explained the rationale behind this release and really sold me on how you, the developer who will eventually be shipping production code on the 2.0 version of the Framework, really benefit by downloading and using this special version of the Beta...

Here is a little quote from our email exchange that I think explains the benefits pretty clearly...

“This is something we’ve never done before – enabling customers to upload code coverage data (and PInvoke usage data) for their managed applications & components. This data can help us further analyze proposed breaking changes, prioritize WinFX coverage of Win32 APIs, and prioritize testing based on a (hopefully) much larger set of real-world data than what we’ve got in-house as part of our AppCompat suite.”

Now, if that has you interested... go check out his original blog post for more info!!

I added a new category (Tips) and 15 new posts to the C# FAQ blog yesterday...

2006-09-07T04:30:00

You may want to check them out at http://blogs.msdn.com/csharpfaq/category/7580.aspx

Cool Code Coverage Tool for C#... CoverageEye.NET

2006-09-07T04:30:00

Check it out at its GDN workspace