Jeffrey Vanneste

I moved my blog to a new host. The new URL is: http://jeffrey.vanneste.ca/tech/. If you have subscribed to the RSS there is no need to change anything as the RSS URL will not be changing.

The ClickOnce Team have started a blog which should be a useful source of information. Two useful links to check out: ClickOnce FAQ and the Official ClickOnce Forum.

I was under the impression it was not possible to compile .NET 1.1 apps in VS2005 but apparently I am wrong. I haven't tried this out yet but pending it actually works this will be a great start to switching to VS2005.

A fellow coworker sent around this awesome Regular Expression link the other day that I thought I should spread as well:

http://www.regular-expressions.info/tutorial.html

I use regular expressions as often as the interval it takes me to forget most of the useful regex stuff I learn. Everytime a situation comes up that I should use regex I have to try and remember everything I knew about regex. Well, this tutorial explains regular expressions in such a way that I'm hoping it will stick with me longer this time.

To go along with this tutorial I couldn't very well not post an awesome regular expression utility. My personal favorite is The Regulator. It links in with the Regular Expression Library so you already have access to tons of regex. If you haven't heard of it, it's worth checking out. Another tool that I sometimes go back to using is Regex Designer which is made specifically for .NET applications. It has an option to generate some code stubs for you which saves some time.

Today there were a bunch of new services announced by Microsoft all with the "Live" title. You can see all the available services at http://ideas.live.com/. Everything is still in beta and only 4 of 7 current offerings are usable.

Live.com
This is the new start.com from what I can tell. Very similar to NetVibes where you can create your own home page and put all the content you want on it. I've never been a fan of these pages. Sure it's nice to have a single place to look at for all your web information but it still requires me to go to the page and check if anything is new. I prefer the model where something notifies me that there is an action to be performed.

Windows Live Safety Center
An online tool to check for virii and perform a "tune-up" on your PC. I'll pass on this one.

Windows Live Mail
This is going to be the new Hotmail apparently. I'm assuming this is what Kahuna got named to. There are a bunch of videos on channel9 showing some of the new features. From what I saw it looks a lot more simple than the current hotmail and also chalk full of AJAX functionality.

Windows Live Favorites
I'm guessing this was suppose to compete with del.icio.us but let's be honest, del.icio.us is too awesome. WLF has a limit on the number of bookmarks you can add so I couldn't even import all my del.icio.us bookmarks, strike one. WLF does not let me add bookmarks easily. To add a new site you have to either click the "Add favorite" button, paste the URL, enter the description and put in some keywords. You can also drag a link to the window. This requires that I keep this window open all the time. No deal. Strike two. You can share bookmarks but I don't see how I can find other peoples bookmarks or where my public URL is for sharing bookmarks. Strike three. WLF seems like it will work OK for non-geeky people to sync bookmarks for home and work. Granted there is no export feature so good luck getting all your bookmarks out of this tool if you ever decide to switch. One thing I will give it though is the AJAX functionality worked pretty slick.

Windows Live Messenger
Not active yet but sounds pretty promising. Sounds like it will have some Skype functions but probably won't be as good as Skype. They were advertising how it will have new emoticons and crap like that. I wish they would ditch that stuff and keep it more simple as a chatting, IM, voice client without all this other fluff.

Windows OneCare Live
A utility for keeping your computer safe, firewall, virus scanner etc etc. It's still not active but I won't use it so I don't really care.

Windows Live Search Mobile
This isn't live yet either but it sounds pretty cool. I'll stick with google on this one though.

Most of these new offerings have MSN spaces to go along with them. It feels a bit more personal when you can see who is behind each new feature. All the blog links are on http://ideas.live.com/ if you want to check them out too.

If anyone has actually subscribed to my old RSS feed it will made inactive in the following weeks. If you want to keep reading my blog you can subscribe to the new feed here.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/jeffreyvanneste

I jumped on the bandwagon today and gave FeedBurner a try. I'm super impressed with this web service. What is FeedBurner? FeedBurner takes any type of RSS feed from your site and juices it up. The free service keeps track of stats, offers the feed in pretty much any format of RSS supported by all the popular readers, link in Google Ads, automatically add in bookmarks you add (del.icio.us and bloglines clippings supported), automatically add in Flickr photos, and so much more. The thing is that they make it super easy to link in all this other content. Adding in google ads was as simple as giving FeedBurner my Google Ad client ID. Del.icio.us links, just give them my del.icio.us ID. Flickr photos, no problem, just enter your flickr friendly name. The result is a single feed that will be supported by pretty much every news reader. Now I can see when I get more than 1 reader.

Onto Flickr, I've been avoiding trying flickr since I figured I would either not be impressed with it or I would love it and would be unable to resist paying for an account. I was always under the impression that the free account enforced smaller picture sizes. I don't know where I got that idea but I had it. I have been using Zoto which offers a lot of space but everything else I haven't been impressed with. The tagging features are pretty weak, the photo uploader caused me issues, and it just doesn't have the finesse of flickr. Anyways, Flickr makes it super easy to integrate with a blog, lots of bulk editing features, adding notes onto photos is really cool, and the photo uploader worked without any issues for me.

If you haven't tried these services out and you have a blog then give them a try.

My web host runs on Linux so I wanted to make sure that I would be able to use ClickOnce without having to find a new host. Well, it turns out that it was very easy to get this to work (though some steps become manual). Here are the steps I followed:

• In the property publish settings you will need to set the Installation URL to the URL you will eventually put the ClickOnce application on. In my case, http://www.bunnyhug.net/ClickOnceTest/. The publishing location can be whatever you want to test with. I used my local IIS.
• If you want your application to check for updates you will need to click the Updates button and set the Update Location to the URL you want to check for updates with. Once again in my case it was http://www.bunnyhug.net/ClickOnceTest/.
• So now build and publish your application to your local IIS or whatever you selected for the Publishing Location. Upload the resulting files to your web server so they will be in the proper folder to match the Installation and Update URL.
• One last thing to do, since I doubt your web host have the proper MIME types set you will need to add the following to a .htaccess file in the folder you uploaded your published files (or use this example.htaccess file):

  AddType application/x-ms-application .application
  AddType application/x-ms-application .manifest
  AddType application/octet-stream .deploy

This allowed me to hit http://www.bunnyhug.net/ClickOnceTest/ and install my Click Once Test application. It should look something like this in IE:

When I tried in firefox I got a bit different result:

For firefox I had to click the Install button which downloaded the Setup.exe file. After running this file manually it installed the application just like clicking the Install button in IE did.

So that should be all to get ClickOnce applications deploying from a non-IIS server. The downside is you will have to upload your files manually after you publish locally each time. If you have FTP access to your host you can make this a bit easier by setting up the Publishing Location to the FTP location that matches your Installation and Update URL.

Overview
The Microsoft® .NET Compact Framework 2.0 Redistributable includes everything you need to run applications built for both NET Compact Framework v1 and v2, including the Common Language Runtime and the .NET Compact Framework class library.

Download

Aaron Stebner has an excellent post on the different options for uninstalling your beta or RC version of Visual Studio 2005. I'll stick with my format and auto-install of windows to avoid any uninstall issues.

And yes, if you haven't heard, VS2005 and SQL Server 2005 are out for MSDN subscribers. The redistributables for .NET 2.0 can be found here:

Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0 Redistributable Package (x86)
Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0 Redistributable Package (x64)

And the SDK links:

.NET Framework 2.0 Software Development Kit (SDK) (x86)
.NET Framework 2.0 Software Development Kit (SDK) (x64)

Update: I found out about this link after this post, http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/downloads/updates/default.aspx has all the downloads for pretty much anything .NET related on Microsoft's site.

So like everybody else today I'm trying out Google Talk. I find the voice quality is really good and even though the interface is really plain I like it nice and simple. I installed google talk on my home machine and whenever I clicked on the Inbox link nothing would happen. Everyone else in the house had no problems. When I tried at work and it didn't work there I was pretty upset. I didn't want to have to run the notifier and google talk.
I was pretty convinced it was something to do with the default browser (I use Maxthon). I tried setting the default browser to IE and everything worked fine, same with firefox. I tried reinstalling Maxthon, still not working. In the end I found a program called SetBrowser which is a simple freeware application that sets the default broswer to anything you want.

"A very simple program that lets you set the default web browser in Windows. Select the browser you want, and the program will modify the required registry settings."

So now the links work great. I tried finding other people having this issue on forums but I had no luck. Hopefully this helps out some people.