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Showing posts from February, 2006

WHY PODCASTS SUCK

or, "Don't bother building it, cause I'm not gonna come." Ah, podcasts.. I’ve tried a sampling of podcasts and have been very disappointed. It seems that learning how to speak clearly, avoid breathing into the microphone, and not saying “um” after every few words are essential skills to producing a quality radio program, and the production landscape for podcasting is severely lacking in this regard. It turns out, quite simply, that owning a microphone and some MP3 recording software doesn’t make you interesting. We live in a technological era where any Joe Schmoe garage band can burn their own CD and distribute it. That doesn't mean it will be any good. The real issue I’ve found with the few podcasts I've taken the time to sample is that they’re significantly devoid of substance. Often they spend more time talking about the podcast than the topic, or they are full of off-topic "cutsie" "aren't we kewl" type jokes and the like. If you

Quality Code Redux, Standards, Dynamic Invocation and Dick Cheney

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Bruce Wood, a frequent poster on the MS C# newsgroup, said it all: "A mediocre standard is better than no standard at all" Bruce was responding to an OP's desire to "innovate" by using a non-standard implementation of event handlers, and he recalled his experience at university where his professor asked, "What is the purpose of writing code?". After the usual answers (e.g. "To make the computer perform some task") he answered "It's to make it clear to the next guy that reads the code how you solved the problem". The point is, if the only objective is to make the computer perform some task, why not just use assembly language? The answer of course is that in a multi-developer environment, or even one where you may someday leave and someone else will take over your code, you want to make it as easy as possible for others to understand not only what you did, but how you did it, and to be able to maintain that code. It is common for

SourceSafe 2005 Internet? NOT!

Let's sort out some of this stuff. My erstwhile eggheadcafe.com partner and chief geek, Robbe Morris, attempted to set this up. I gotta tell you, this is one dude who doesn't give up easily. He is persistent, dogged, determined. Bottom line? He gave up! Mostly because it wants to hog website "#1" and we aren't gonna mess with the metabase. He even talked to PSS and they basically said "That's what you have to do". Dudes! WebSite "#1" is not going to get changed to accomodate VSS 2005's quirks, OK? Now let's do a little research, mostly by Googling "Sourcesafe 2005 Internet": First big info blog: http://www.hannesschmidt.de/node/35 Prognosis: Not good. Patient might be alive, but we can't communicate with him / her.... Next Victim: http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/categories/softwareDevelopment/2005/11/24.html Prognosis: Success, but had to workaround "Braindead configuration". Next: http://jasonf-blog.blo

Hacking Internet Explorer 6.0 / 7.0, Feeds Manager, ClickOnce Broken, and a DOS Hole?

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Technorati Tag: IE7 Developers who are interested in playing with "add on" concepts in Internet Explorer 7 would be well-advised to take a look at the MSFeeds.dll COM Interfaces. Here are a few screen caps of the COM-Interop generated assembly classes you will get when you set a COM reference to the MSFeeds management COM server DLL. There are three main classes, the first is the FeedManagerClass: FeedManager provides methods to add, sync and delete feeds from the Feed folder, as well as maintenance items such as IsSubscribed. Next is the FeedFolderWatcher: FeedFolderWatcher offers management of Downloading and monitoring the Feeds Folder, along with a rich set of events related to same. Finally, you have the FeedWatcherClass: FeedWatcher handles granular tasks / events such as the status of a downloading feed, the FeedItemCount and error handling. With a .NET class library wrapping these COM methods/ delegates / interfaces, developers should be able to build neat "Add