Juice

Download Juice 1.0

Sun, 27 Feb 2005 19:20:50 GMT

Last week, I compiled a version of Juice and made it publicly available for download. It's still Beta.

http://www.kbcafe.com/juice/download.html

I need .NET Framework 2003 Applications!

Sat, 26 Feb 2005 17:53:38 GMT

Jay Roxe: I'm working to create a library of applications that we can use for testing compatibility between .NET Framework 2003 applications and Whidbey applications.

http://blogs.msdn.com/jroxe/archive/2005/02/17/375715.aspx

C# gzip

Sat, 26 Feb 2005 00:10:25 GMT

If you didn't figure it out, I've been trying to figure out how to gzip w/ C#. Google-it and you get SharpZipLib. If you read the license terms, then you'll find you cannot link SharpZipLib with a class library and distribute that class library, except if the class library is also GPL. Wow, that's ridiculous. That's like super-GPL, super stupid. I couldn't find anything else, so I considered writing my own wrapper over ZLib1, but after a bit of testing and a little frustration with HttpWebRequest, I've given up, for now. I also considered writing my own gzip routines, but a glance into requirements made me realized this is no one-hour undertaking. Congrats to anybody whose undertaken that challenge with success.

C# gzip

Sat, 26 Feb 2005 00:09:06 GMT

If you didn't figure it out, I've been trying to figure out how to gzip w/ C#. Google-it and you get SharpZipLib.

gzip Tester

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 23:25:06 GMT

Quick test a site for gzip encoded content.

Web Sniffer

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 16:38:59 GMT

Very cool and easy to use Web sniffer.

Tim Bray on XP

Wed, 23 Feb 2005 23:14:16 GMT

Tim wrote a great summary of an XP workshop at Sun. Here's some great excerpts.

Tim Bray: Writing tests after you’ve written the code is boring and painful: writing them first (a key premise of XP) makes it more interesting, and thus less likely that you’ll skip them.

Randy: I've never quite gotten into writing the test case first.

Tim Bray: Feature-at-a-time development makes development project schedules immensely more predictable. [cut] Detailed specification, in advance, of the functions of a large software system is essentially impossible. [cut] You don’t try to pretend that you’re so smart that you can design everything so you won’t have to refactor as you go along.

Tim Bray: XP tends to squash out the difference between development and maintenance modes: once you’ve built the first feature, you’re in maintenance mode forever.

Randy: Thanks Tim! This gives me a lot issues that I can work on (self improvement).

PHP Suicide

Wed, 23 Feb 2005 06:17:46 GMT

Rafe Colburn: PHP makes me want to kill myself. Not as much as it did 6 months ago, but still.

Randy: I'm there.

.NET 2.0

Mon, 21 Feb 2005 02:27:41 GMT

Well, in my adventures to find an HTML editor, I decided to download Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition Beta. This'll also be my first install of the .NET 2.0 Beta framework.

VS.Net HTML Editor

Mon, 21 Feb 2005 02:08:48 GMT

I'm experiencing life without VS.Net. On purpose. I've been able to replace most of the functionality of VS.Net with other free products, like #develop. The one thing I can't seem to replace is the HTML editor in VS.Net. Amazingly simple, or so you'd think, but I've been unable to find an adequate replacement HTML editor. Is VS.Net the best HTML editor? I tried and hated html-kit and Web Dwarf. Suggestions welcomed.

Great Software License List

Sat, 19 Feb 2005 15:05:34 GMT

OpenSource.org: For your convenience, we have collected here copies of the licenses approved by OSI. If you distribute your software under one of these licenses, you are permitted to say that your software is "OSI Certified Open Source Software."

Randy: A very cool list of open source licenses. I'm planning to re-release the Juice RSS reader as commerical open source software. An experiment in where I think software should exist. Open source, so the developers can help each other, commercial, so we keep the wage level up.

AxWebBrowser in #develop

Wed, 16 Feb 2005 01:22:03 GMT

My favorite .NET control is of course the AxWebBrowser interop to the COM ActiveX WebBrowser control. Of course, you add the control in VS.NET to the custom component palette and then use it as any normal .NET control. In #develop, this is not possible. You can't add ActiveX controls to the component palette. A little googling and I think I'm onto the HowTo of AxWebBrowser with #develop.

Run AxImp.exe on SHDocVw.dll. This will produce two DLLs; AxSHDocVw.dll and SHDocVw.dll.
Import the AxDocVw as a reference to your project.

That's it. You can now double click on the reference and view the classes and interface in the Assembly Scout. You can also add the AxWebBrowser to a form. Unfortunately, it doesn't work with the WinForms designer. Sorry!

Windows Revealed

Tue, 15 Feb 2005 18:20:52 GMT

Wesner Moise: Anyway, I thought I would have some fun and reveal millions of lines of Windows code in this post:

1) Windows (and coincidentally Office) rely heavily on millions of lines of code starting with open curly braces. Curly braces are essential for these popular software packages to deliver their rich functionality.

{

NDoc

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 23:39:41 GMT

Yesterday, I spent my first few moments with NDocs. I commented my entire class library properly for NDoc and hit the generate documentation command in #develop. The HTML was ugly and I wouldn't let someone view that, but the old Win32 Help file was amazing. Makes me want to release a class library or two, just to show this off.

By the way, I really am enjoying #develop. No more accepting piracy. I've always hated that most of the companies I've worked for pirate their software (VS.NET & Office). Now I'm resolved not to accept that anymore. You pirate, I don't work for you.

Fiddler

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 20:19:13 GMT

Eric Lawrence: Fiddler is a HTTP Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP traffic between your computer and the Internet.

Randy: Fiddler rocks! Thanks Eric.

Process.Start(url)

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 07:10:36 GMT

I've noticed quite a lot lately that the .NET Framework method System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(url) is unreliable for launching the default browser. I often get an exception; Win32Exception: The requested lookup key was not found in any active activation context. Others seem to experiencing the same. It may have something todo with applications that embed the axWebBrowser.

#develop

Wed, 09 Feb 2005 04:31:02 GMT

Got a new computer in the mail from Dell. No recent VS.NET CDs at hand. What's a computer without an IDE? Welcome, #develop. Wow, this really is great. Obviously, there are missing features from VS.NET, but compare that with NUnit integration and a # load (pun intended) of other features and we've got a winner. I even imported some code from a VS.NET project and it worked.

I donated 10 EUROs. I'm gonna start using it more often, outside of work. If I continue to find it useful, then I'll donate some more.

Flickr .NET Library Description

Mon, 07 Feb 2005 23:07:55 GMT

A .NET wrapper around the Flickr (http://www.flickr.com) API. Allows desktop and web applications or even smart clients to provide direct image upload functionality to Flickr as well as providing access to the other Flickr services. Link.

Speech SDK

Wed, 02 Feb 2005 01:49:39 GMT

Microsoft: The Microsoft® Speech SDK 5.1 adds Automation support to the features of the previous version of the Speech SDK.