Section: Blogs
Laziness .NET — the Professional Edition
Aug 29, 2003 1 min.
Back in June I published a column showing you how to make a simple Pocket PC remote for Windows Media player. I didn’t know it at the time, but some of my readers have sent in links to a professional version of the same idea. Built using the .NET Framework 1.1 and C#, Zerama looks amazing… everything I wanted in mine, but built and supported by someone else (I love to code, but I’m happy to have someone else do it for me too!
New “Coding 4 Fun” article is up…
Aug 21, 2003 1 min.
Should be up and live already so here is the URL: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/using/columns/code4fun/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dncodefun/html/code4fun08222003.asp If you diff this article with the pieces from my blog… you will see the work of Henry Borys, the excellent editor of these columns (and a ton of other MSDN material)… the changes are generally small, but critical. One example…. he didn’t like my name (Keeping Work Fun) so we now have Developing Priorities: Fun First
Aug 13, 2003 2 min.
I’ve been using the Application Updater Block, as you may have gathered from some of my previous posts, and I like it a lot… but I’ve been wanting to add a few features to it. Well, I have it all planned out in my head, but I haven’t gotten around to it, so I thought I would at least throw out my feature ideas and see what people say about them…
Aug 12, 2003 5 min.
With this final bit of text, this is the whole article… before any of your comments… and before my wonderful editor (Henry Borys) has attacked it. If you were to take the content from these blog entries and diff it with the published article… you’ll see the amazing impact that a good editor can have on your writing. Storing and Retrieving the Feed Lists Once I had the RSS feeds displaying, and I had tested the system with enough sample data (translation: it worked against my blog’s feed) to ensure it was working correctly, it was time to move onto creating code to support retrieving and editing the personal and master feed lists.
Finally got back to the article
Aug 12, 2003 5 min.
Thanks to everyone who emailed me and offered to help… but the problem was time, not technical… despite my joke about working on the cool stuff first, a ton of high-priority stuff has made me weeks late on my article! Although I did hit some snags with odd unsorted feeds (MSDN’s!), I managed to get everything working the way I wanted. I’m still a little unhappy with the system because I don’t strip out potentially bad tags from any HTML content included in the RSS (as per http://diveintomark.
Jul 31, 2003 4 min.
Continuing along with the rest of the article, I start to layout the basic design of what I am about to build… Designing our New Feature As a fairly low-priority item, the request wasn’t described in any more detail than that one line, but I had a pretty good idea about what folks around MSDN were looking for so I started with a rough design. The RSS Viewer window will support the viewing of an RSS feed and the dragging of links from the feed into the rest of the system.
Well, I’m not 100% sure I’ll start writing my articles into the blog… but…
Jul 30, 2003 3 min.
Here is a teaser for the article I am currently working on… Keeping Work Fun Duncan Mackenzie Microsoft Developer Network August 8, 2003 Summary: Duncan Mackenzie describes how the ‘coolness’ of a feature can increase its chance of being finished early on in a development project. People Keep Making me Work If you’ve been following my columns, you probably think that I spend all my time writing up fun and cool code samples without having to work on anything boring.
Jul 30, 2003 1 min.
What would you folks think if I wrote one of my MSDN articles in a serial fashion into my blog? Basically just posted each section as I wrote it? I’m considering doing this for my next Coding 4 Fun article, but before I flood your aggregator with piles of text I thought I’d look for some feedback…
New Blogs page on the MSDN Visual Basic Developer Center
Jul 27, 2003 1 min.
I’m planning to revamp this page to include ‘featured posts’ (selected by me out of all the blogs I get my hands on, not just the ones listed on this page), but here (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/support/community/blogs/) is the first iteration of that page up on the live site. I’m interested in feedback, as always, but please hold off on “Why wasn’t my blog listed?”, space was limited in this version but I am planning to expand to additional pages at some point in the future….
You learn something new everyday…
Jul 25, 2003 1 min.
Ok, I know that Paul knew this, but did anyone else notice that the VB.NET Try…Catch syntax includes a ‘when’ clause? Try [ tryStatements ] [ Catch [ exception [ As type ] ] [ When expression ] [ catchStatements ] ] [ Exit Try ] … [ Finally [ finallyStatements ] ] End Try``` When Optional. A Catch statement with a When clause will only catch exceptions when expression evaluates to True.