Section: Blogs

Long overdue, but here is the source for the “blog copier”

Apr 2, 2005 1 min.

In my first post on this site, I mentioned an application that I wrote to copy blog posts from one .Text server to another. Overall, I didn’t think the application had any real use after the web service I used was removed from the weblogs.asp.net servers, but I’m posting it anyway for anyone who might find it useful. Source here: http://www.duncanmackenzie.net/Samples/#blogcopy

Moving code from VB 2003 to VB 2005… Accessing Shared members from Instances…

Mar 28, 2005 2 min.

Lately I’ve been luckily enough to be able to reuse several bits of code I’ve written in Visual Basic 2002 and 2003, namely code from a few of my earlier MSDN articles (Design Surface and the Control series). Since I was planning to make a few changes, I pulled these projects into Visual Basic 2005 Beta 1 (instead of just referencing the already existing assemblies created with the .NET Framework 1.

This didn’t take long…. putting your Tivo shows onto a PSP…

Mar 27, 2005 1 min.

Brian and I were chatting (arguing actually) about the PSP the other day at lunch… I thought the idea of selling movies for the device, movies that you couldn’t use in a DVD player at home, was crazy and Brian didn’t. Brian’s opinion is likely the more accurate one (it usually is), these PSP movies will probably sell, definitely at airports and for rentals and probably in less volume for normal use…

Caterpillars…. yum…

Mar 26, 2005 1 min.

The theme at my son’s preschool last week was Caterpillars, and it also happened to be his turn to bring the snack (the kids rotate through this task, bring snacks/juice for 16 people)… so my wife went all-out and baked these breadstick-larva creations… … and these butterfly cookies. Recipe for the breadstick/caterpillars is here Very yummy and supposedly quite well received by the kids…

Pulling from MSDN… the code…

Mar 22, 2005 1 min.

(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…

More on “pulling” MSDN content into my site…

Mar 21, 2005 2 min.

In my last post, I was talking about pulling my articles from MSDN into the chrome of my site. This type of system could be created using a frameset, but frames are evil, so that isn’t the approach I took. Instead, knowing a bit about the files on MSDN’s web servers, I took advantage of a special xml file that exists for most of our articles. This file is created as part of our publishing process and exists so that we can pull articles into the chrome of our developer centers (like this).

Playing around with pulling my articles into my own site’s chrome…

Mar 19, 2005 1 min.

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 🙂

Some thoughts on “Classic VB”

Mar 10, 2005 3 min.

This topic has been in the ‘news’ lately (well, at least in the blogs) and I’ve been considering replying…. but it turns out I don’t have to, because Dave Totzke has done it for me. I don’t really agree with his comment that we’ve kept C++ alive because Office is written in it… it is actually because the managed world doesn’t replace the need to write native code against the underlying hardware and OS.