Since it’s been almost two years since my last blog post, I figured I owed the remaining 3 subscribers of my blog a short update on what I have been up to...

#1 – Maya

There have indeed been a couple of interesting things going on, and first and foremost, that would include the birth of our amazingly beautiful and unbelievably cute daughter Maya in June last year :-)

She just turned one year old this week, so time flies indeed! If you would be interested in seeing some more pictures, then I’m sure you can figure out where her own website would be located if you studied the incredibly complicated naming pattern I used to locate my own website :-)

#2 - Mayando

Because Project #1 called for a way to keep the family up to date and to regularly show off exactly how cute Maya is, and (almost equally importantly) because I was looking for an excuse to learn ASP.NET MVC, I decided to write a photo blogging web application. “What, another photo gallery site”, you might ask? Eh, yeah, exactly. But in my defense: I looked hard at the existing ones and couldn’t find one that covered my requirements so this is one I built to fit my needs :-)

Nonetheless, I didn’t just want to build a one-off “baby web site for Maya”, but really a generic application that I could also use later on use as the engine for my own photo blog – and that you, dear reader, might also want to use if you want to publish a collection of photos in a nice and user-friendly way. (For example, I have an architect friend who is interested in using it as a portfolio site for the houses he designed.)

And so, Mayando was born: a full-featured photo blogging application that you can use to showcase your photos online.

Now I did not want to reinvent solutions to the problem of globally storing and serving images on the web, so I figured that I should only build a rich front-end on top of existing photo storage services such as Flickr. So I built a provider model where the URL’s of the photos and their details (and comments) just get “sucked in” from a photo sharing site and you can work with them from your own website. So basically, the photos get pulled in from a service such as Flickr and then displayed through Mayando, using a lot of navigation possibilities (by creating static pages and dynamic galleries, by browsing through photos, comments, tags, dates, ...).

It also allows visitors to post new comments and obviously I needed to handle comment spam so again I implemented a provider model for anti-spam services (such as Mollom).

And finally, the whole thing had to be easily customizable so I made sure to allow different themes for the photo blog’s look and feel, with customization options ranging from simple (e.g. simply changing the CSS stylesheet) to advanced (completely changing the entire site layout and/or individual pages). Thankfully, by now I know that the ASP.NET MVC framework is so flexible it easily let me do all this with surprisingly little effort. Anyway, I won’t go into the many details – if you’re interested in how it works: it’s open source so feel free to look at the Mayando source code and let me know if you want to contribute!

If you just want to see it running: check out the Mayando Demo Site or of course my own photo blog :-)

#3 – Flickr Schedulr v1.4 & v2.0

Because Project #1 and Project #2 meant I would be using Flickr more, I figured it was also time to give my Flickr Schedulr application an update to incorporate feedback from a number of users.

In case you’re wondering what it is: Flickr Schedulr is a Windows desktop application that automatically uploads pictures to Flickr based on a schedule (e.g. to post a new picture every day at a certain time). It allows you to create a queue of pictures to be uploaded, along with their titles, descriptions, tags, and the photosets and groups into which they should end up.

I published v1.4 last January; new features include the possibility to upload multiple pictures at a time in batch, better handling of multiple selected files and overall UI improvements.

I’ve also been working really hard on v2.0 which is a complete rewrite of the application in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and as such looks and feels so much nicer in many ways than the previous version. It will also have a few new features of course. I’m still polishing some things but you can expect to see a release in the next few weeks.

Since I’ve been very happy with CodePlex for my other projects, I decided to move the source code and work items there and lo and behold: here is the new Flickr Schedulr homepage on CodePlex!

#4 – Proxy Monitor

Last October, the trend continued: another release around a year after the last one. This time, I got the help from David Huntley, who was kind enough to finally get something off my list I’ve been planning to do for a while now: properly setting the proxy via the Win32 API’s instead of just writing to the registry. This more robust way of setting the proxy came for free with the new feature he implemented, which is support for multiple connections. This allows you to specify proxy servers for other connections than the default LAN (such as dial-up or VPN connections).

To make it easier to work together, I decided to move this project to CodePlex as well. So for all information, downloads, forums, etc. go to the new Proxy Monitor homepage at CodePlex!

#5 – The NOT Part

So after a small list of things that I have been up to the last two years or so, it’s quite clear what I have not been up to: blogging. And that’s probably going to stay that way. I either have too little to say (which is increasingly the case), or too much (which would take too much time to write down). So honestly, I expect this would be the last entry on my blog for quite a while – if not eternity.

In case it becomes the latter: thanks for having followed my random thoughts for the last 7 years, and if you want to keep up with what I’m doing on the technical side of life, follow my projects on CodePlex:

• Mayando
• Flickr Schedulr
• Proxy Monitor
• BuildCop
• Configuration Section Designer
• Mollom for .NET

If you want to keep up with the non-technical side, check out my photography site - <plug>based on Mayando of course, and updated with the help of Flickr Schedulr</plug> :-)

For reasons still unclear to me, Windows Explorer became painfully slow on my Windows Vista beta (build 5219). Expanding directories in the Folder Tree would work as normal, but simply showing the contents of a folder would easily take half a minute or more. I've seen other reports of this on the internet but without any solution.

So I was doing all my regular work in the command line (which is quite horrible if you're used to the whole drag & drop thingy) until I found out that simply checking the the "Use Windows classic folders" setting (Tools menu, Folder Options) resolved my issue:

The "Show preview and filters" option sure looks a lot better, but I'll pass if it takes more than 2 seconds to render, thankyouverymuch... But I'm sure this will get resolved in future builds of the OS. In the meantime, I've got my Windows Explorer back at full speed!

If you're not using NAnt or another NDoc-enabled build tool for your build cycle, you might find this little batch file useful:

@ECHO OFF
REM Set the full path to the NDoc console executable.
SET NDOC="C:\Program Files\NDoc 1.3\bin\net\1.1\NDocConsole.exe"
REM Set the relative path to the output directory.
SET OUTPATH=doc
REM Loop over the NDoc project files (*.ndoc).
FOR %%P IN (*.ndoc) DO (
 ECHO Generating documentation for "%%~nP"...
 ECHO.
 REM Run NDoc for the project file.
 %NDOC% -project=%%P
 REM Copy output files to the current directory.
 MOVE %OUTPATH%\*.chm .
 REM Delete output directory.
 RMDIR %OUTPATH%
 ECHO.
)

This will just loop over all .ndoc files in the current path and build the documentation for it into a 'doc' directory. Then it will move the generated .chm Windows help file to the current directory and delete the output directory again so you only have the .chm file left and not the temporary files.

What I thought was pretty cool is that you can use batch files to loop over a fileset like *.ndoc using the "FOR %%P IN (*.NDOC) DO (...)" syntax. Inside the bracket scope, you have the %%P variable which will be expanded to the current file in the loop, and you can use %%~nP to get just the filename without the extension. There are a lot more of these substitution enhancements, just type "help for" in your favorite command shell.

For some more batch magic, see Raymond Chen's 90-byte solution to search for a file in your PATH. Nifty!

After the GMail Filesystem for Linux (via doggi), it seems somebody's also created a GMail Drive shell extension for Windows (via Early Adopter).

To me that spells: free backup space (I don't see it replacing my local hard drive just yet) - so I guess I won't be giving away any GMail invites after all :-)

So all that nifty stuff, but still no clean solution to just fetch my GMail to Outlook :-(

I've seen on Tom Mertens' blog that Robert McLaws is asking to support the number 2 feature suggestion for Visual Studio 2005: an updated icon set that ships with it. I heartily agree. What's more: I'll top the suggestion and expand it a little.

We don't need just an updated icon set to ship with Visual Studio. If Windows Forms 2.0 is the final stage in Windows Forms development and Microsoft wants people to ship products with a compelling "User Experience" on the road to Longhorn, then they better start providing the community with the proper tools to do so. Icons are in important part of the user experience (platform-wide consistency is an important design principle), so the most important step here is indeed to make the common user interface elements obiquitously available.

In my mind, that's not just shipping the icon files with the development environment. It's also publishing those icons on a searchable resource-like website where you can just download the icon you need without having to search the entire web and skim out the ridiculously outdated or overly charging icon-library websites. Microsoft must already have some central library of these icons to be shared by the product teams so why not share it with the world?

The next step is to go all .NET'y and package a large number of common icons in strongly signed .NET resource assemblies (dll's). These could be distributed with the runtime and placed in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) so they're readily available to all your .NET programs. That gives you the advantage of being able to update all your icons to the latest (fanciest) version with just a configuration change and it follows the same idea as reusable dll's in the first place: why embed all those common elements in each and every program when you can share one version between multiple programs?

Anyway, an update to the icon set would be a requirement in my mind. The rest would be a nice-to-have. But I really don't want to start searching the web for a decent looking Save button ever again.

Yahoo! Mail has just upgraded its free email service so you can store up to 100MB in stead of the meager 6MB it was before. Furthermore, it also has an advanced search feature that lets you search messages in your mail folders by certain criteria.

So, that's a very obvious move toward Google's upcoming GMail service, which allows storage up to 1GB and also has this type of full-text searching. (Or so I'm told by the hype machine anyway, because it's in beta and on an invite-only basis for now.) So who said competition wasn't doing any good for customers?

So that's two search engines coupled with email services making a move. I'm predicting MSN Search and Hotmail will soon follow. And if they want to keep an edge, they'll have to surpass it somehow.

I have an idea how they might achieve that: why does everybody want POP or IMAP access to mailboxes? (It's still in beta but there's already a POP proxy for GMail [via Scoble's Linkblog]...) Because the browser experience just isn't good enough for demanding email users. (And for long-term archival, but that's something these new large email storage spaces are supposed to handle.)

So how about a smart client for Hotmail? Think about it, access your email everywhere in a rich GUI without having to explicitly install anything. It's a perfect sell for the smart client, .NET, Hotmail, MSN - Microsoft tout court. Should be easy, right?

I've been trying to get the WinHEC build of Longhorn installed but to no avail... Did anyone get it up and running on a Dell Latitude D600?

I run the setup (from within Windows XP) to install it onto a freshly formatted partition, and I get up to the part where it's supposed to start copying files onto the partition. At least I suspect so, because I get "An error occurred while copying files".

Now I've read in the readme (I actually read those on anything other than RTM builds nowadays) that the hard disk driver must be supported - "or else"... (Or else what? I don't know. It probably throws funky "cannot copy" errors in your face, right?) Luckily, you can insert a floppy disk containing drivers at some time during the setup process if your hard disk is not supported.

Well, 'luckily' is a bit of an overstatement. A floppy disk? Let me sketch that into its right context here: I'm installing Windows Longhorn, a true 21st-century OS with vector graphics, a filesystem backed by a relational database, an extensible item store, a polyglot communication stack, all programmable with the obiquitous .NET runtime, and (how conveniently) a brandnew driver model - and it's asking me for a stone age floppy disk? Even if I had a floppy drive for my laptop (which I don't), I certainly wouldn't have any driver disks to feed it with. It's kind of like "here's that ftp server with the zipped 19GB pr0n collection you asked for, but it only has a 56K modem and there's 178 users before you".

Anyway. It's alpha. Years from shipping. A lot can change. (Read: change this!)

So with that option out of the way, I tried installing it onto a new VirtualPC. Unfortunately, you can't mount a directory (the one containing the setup files) as a CD in VirtualPC. So I made an ISO out of the lot and mounted that, but I can't get VirtualPC to boot it (how do you make a bootable cd?)... It would be nice if VirtualPC could map the virtual drive onto the local filesystem (kind of like the nifty Shared Folders, but then backwards) so I could try installing it straight onto that, but there's no way of accessing the virtual drive straight from the host system as far as I know.

Alas, so far nothing worked. No Longhorn for me. If anybody has any ideas, be sure to let me know!

Although .NET is mainly targeted at Windows right now, it's obvious from the Mono Project (now in beta 2 phase!) and other initiatives like the SSCLI that running .NET code on other platforms is either already possible, or within reasonable reach. So how do you take that into account when developing in .NET?

Personally, I knew I was doing the "right thing" all along because it just felt right, but it's nice to see that reflected by 'trusted sources' once in a while: Scott Hanselman takes some gems away from nGallery's Mono compliance and sprinkles them with a little of his own fairy dust. Also, Clemens Vasters just noticed that there's a dasBlog port on mono. These accomplishments are both pretty impressive.

So here's the aggregated wisdom, with a personal topping to cover it up:

1. Use constants like System.Environment.NewLine and System.IO.Path.DirectorySeparatorChar - everywhere and always.
2. Furthermore, use platform helper methods as much as you can. Don't outsmart the system, it's not because you know from your daily Windows usage how to append a filename to a directory like so:
   
   

   string fullPath = directoryName +@"\"+ fileName;

   that this wisdom will help you on all platforms. (By the way, did you check to see if directoryName didn't already end in a backslash? And add a myriad of other checks here as well.)
   
   Use
   
   

   string fullPath = System.IO.Path.Combine( directoryName, fileName );

   in stead. Guaranteed to be correct (regardless of the platform), more readable and meaningful, and less code (if you'd add the necessary checks to your own code of course)!
3. Make sure sure all I/O operations (files, directories, ...) are case sensitive.
4. Make sure you don't compile your assemblies with the /incremental flag.

I'd like to see that first point supported in the framework just a little better though, since not using Environment.NewLine is just that tiny bit easier. Compare

Console.WriteLine( "Exception details:\r\nMessage: {0}\r\nStack Trace:\r\n{1}", e.Message, e.StackTrace );

to

Console.WriteLine( "Exception details:{0}Message: {1}{0}Stack Trace:{0}{2}", Environment.NewLine, e.Message, e.StackTrace );

Arguably, the second one does look a bit cleaner, but it's still more cumbersome with the extra parameter. So, an extra escape character indicating a new line (regardless of the platform) would be nice. Who cares about those 'return' and 'newline' codes anyway these days.

Other than that: stick to the rules and on one beautiful day, you just might find yourself running on Linux. And why not, why not indeed.

I've mentioned before that I'm very annoyed by the "My Pictures & Family" folders magically (re)appearing, since I really like to keep things spotless clean. Unfortunately I still haven't found a solution for that - anyone else in the meantime? Maybe Raymond Chen can tell me why they're so important that Microsoft decided to keep shoving them in my face?

Anyway, you might have noticed that the Adobe guys share the same problem. After installing Acrobat Reader, you're granted the golden gift of a "My eBooks" folder in "My Documents", apparently enabling you to do all sorts of fascinating stuff with eBooks. Here's a hint: I don't read eBooks. I read pdf's (why do you think I installed Acrobat Reader in the first place) and regular books. I like the smell of paper. I'll read used word-of-the-day toilet paper before I'll read an eBook. And even if I did want to read eBooks (in case I ever get a Tablet PC for example), I'd decide myself where I'd like to store them thankyouverymuch. So get it off my system! Searching for "My eBooks" (just that, not even "My eBooks folder sucks" or "stop that damn eBooks folder from ever appearing") shows that I'm not the only one who's pretty annoyed by this.

Fortunately, I just found a very easy solution to kill the eBooks folder once and for all: just move the eBook.api file from Adobe Reader's "plug_ins" directory to the "Optional" directory. Done. Byebye eBooks.

InfoPath 2003 is a pretty cool product with lots of potential, but it's obvious that it's still a little young for the real world. Here are some issues I found when developing with InfoPath out-of-the-box:

• You can't make fields required easily if the datasource is a (readonly) webservice since you can't change that definition and you can't set the validation to "cannot be blank" anymore. Apparently, this is by design: "Notice that the Cannot be blank option is disabled; this property is always disabled in the InfoPath user interface when your data source is an external data source". Why is that?
• Publishing is a pain; I just wanted to publish to a website on my local machine and after a lot of head-scratching I found that you actually have to deploy to a network share. The first thing you do is set the directory (the virtual directory on your drive) and then the web url from which the form will be accessible.
• Copying the form to another location - e.g. from develepment to acceptation or production - can't be done easily since the originating location is baked in so you have to redeploy it. Alternatively you could try to script the process to extract the xsn file (which is really just a cab file), update the location and repack it.
• You can't prefill a form with data from a WebService easily, if you don't want the user to click a button first then you'll have to resort to scripting. This looks like a very common scenario though, so I'd expect this to be a lot easier.
• Data binding the controls to the fields can be tedious, a drag & drop mode would be easier.
• There's no support for WSE so I can't use WS-Security; another option would be to use custom SoapHeaders but there's also no support for that.
• There's no password control, so I can't prompt the user for his credentials without having him expose his password to potential neckbreathers.
• It would be nice if InfoPath worked a bit more like ClickOnce: click an xsn in your browser and have the the form open immediately in stead of getting the standard Open/Save dialog. Of course, it's still a cab file so it could be harmful to just allow this without the ClickOnce wonders of .NET security - but it would provide a much more transparant user experience.
• Copy/paste doesn't work between instances of InfoPath, not even for plain text. So it's pretty hard to copy part of an existing form to another one.

Note that this is based on a standard InfoPath 2003 installation, I haven't tried the new InfoPath SP1 Preview yet (which might solve some issues but certainly not all of them).