Section: Blogs

VBFeeds.com is up and running… check it out!

Oct 2, 2005 1 min.

Thanks to the work of Serge Baranovsky (the guy behind VBCity) a new site is up that aggregates content from various Visual Basic related sources, including personal and team blogs from both inside and outside of Microsoft. Check out the launch annoucement here, and check out the site as soon as you can.

What will it take to get new episodes of Firefly on the air?

Oct 1, 2005 1 min.

I was just at Redmond Town Center, an open-air mall, and I saw a bunch of folks wearing t-shirts that read “Joss Whedon is my master now” (see here and here) … and I started thinking; how well does this movie have to do to get the show back? Should everyone who loves it go see the movie twice? three times? Buy the DVD box set?

My old guide to the Updater Application Block is up at a new URL…

Sep 29, 2005 1 min.

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…

Sep 28, 2005 1 min.

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.

A bug in my RSS generator, but is it really invalid?

Sep 27, 2005 2 min.

The RSS generator for MSDN, creator of this feed, and many more … has a small problem. Way upstream, when various people inside the company enter information about an upcoming headline, they have the ability to specify a URL to a download. The intent was for this to be a URL to an actual downloadable file, so when I generate an RSS item from that headline entry, I take that URL and turn it into an enclosure entry in the RSS file.