Jeffrey Vanneste

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.