Nick Bradbury's
recent "Codin' Fool" post has me feeling mighty jealous. Although the "army of tiny little geeks" often try and get me up out of bed to get back to the keyboard I always knock them back on their ass so I can get some sleep and be ready for my "real job" in the morning. Being able to get up in the middle of the night to code away and then be able to hit the sack for a mid-afternoon nap is something that most of us can't really do. In a sick way it does sound mighty appealing to me though. Maybe some day....
A month or so ago I posted about some problems I was having with base page classes when I converted an existing application to .NET 2.0, as well as some potential work arounds. At the time I "reported" the bug it sounded like I was mostly out of luck and would just need to manually update my pages to fit the new "model". Today I came across Scott Guthrie's "Compatability Testing with ASP.NET 2.0" post which states the following:
Custom Page Base Classes that code-behind classes derive from that declare controls as field declarations. Because of the changes to the code-behind model, users who have migrated apps to V2 sometimes see null reference exceptions when accessing these fields on the “grandparent” base-class because the .aspx compiler can’t correctly wire-up the control references to the fields. We’ve now added support for this in V2, and the migration wizard will automatically configure code-behind classes that use custom base classes appropriately for you.
Sounds reasonable :-)
As I was experimenting with modifying the Bloglines plugin for Omea last night I realized that it would probably be pretty easy to modify the plugin for Newsgator. Tonight I created a Newsgator Plugin for Omea that seems to work pretty well. The plugin adds a “Import Newsgator Subscription…” item to the File menu. Clicking the item brings up a login window where you enter you’re Newsgator login, password, and edition (Web Edition). After entering the login details you can click the “Import” button and optionally check a preview checkbox if you want to view the feeds you’re about to import.
After importing the feeds you have to select all the feeds and right click “Properties”. Within the properties window you need to select HTTP Login and enter you’re Newsgator login details. If you add a new feed via Newsgator you need to rerun the Newsgator Subscription Import, and if you add a feed directly to Omea it doesn’t get synced back up with Newsgator. The current sync API’s for both Newsgator and Bloglines don’t let you add feeds via the API.
After I do a little more testing I’ll be making this available to anyone whose interested. Drop me a line / comment if your interested.
I continue to be impressed with all the great software that JetBrains puts out. Last year as I was working on a Java project I was looking around for a good Java IDE. Everyone, and I really mean everyone said to checkout IntelliJ. I actually ended up using NetBeans/Eclipse on the project but the little time I had to experiment with IntelliJ was very positive.
Fast forward to the 1.0 release of ReSharper. I don’t think I need to say more. If you think I do just go try out ReSharper and you’ll see why I’d rather be programming in VS.NET 2003 with ReSharper then in Whidbey with no ReSharper. It’s an awesome tool.
As I pointed out in my last post I recently began experimenting with Rss client apps again. For the past several months I’ve been reading feeds using the Newsgator Online which overall has worked out pretty well, however, I miss the rich experience of a rich client. I recently found out that FeedDemon had support for Bloglines and Newsgator so I decided to give it a try. It was very nice. I didn’t want to hop on the FeedDemon bandwagon too fast though so I decided to give Omea a try from JetBrains. After a little bit of time playing with the software I wanted it to become my RSS Reader. Unfortunetly it didn’t have Bloglines or Newsgator integration.
It does however have a pretty nice plugin architecture that allows you to write your own plugins. The latest “ Tokaj” build had included as part of the install a sample plugin that imports feeds from Bloglines. At first it sounded like it was exactly what I wanted. Unfortunetly the plugin wasn’t importing the bloglines feed that would allow me to keep my feeds pseudo sync’d between machines, it was using the real RSS feed. I quickly launched VS.NET and opened the Bloglines plugin source code that was provided. I was able to relatively quickly update the plugin to use the Bloglines feed url, rather then the real feed. This give me the sync I’ve been wanting. It’s not perfect since when I update a feed it marks all feeds as read on bloglines, but, it’s just as good as FeedDemon. And instead of just getting an RSS Reader I also get all the other cool stuff in Omea.