It's quite annoying to keep the Blogroll on your weblog up-to-date while using offline readers. Using RSSBandit and dasBlog">dasBlog brings a quite handy solution to you. First of all, open your dasBlog configuration and check the 'Enable Config Web Service' option.

Now open the 'Options' dialog of RSSBadit and select the 'Remote Storage' pane. Here check 'Use remote storage', select 'dasBlog' from the drop-down list and fill out the required login credentials. Your API usually is located at something like http://YouBlog/ConfigEditingService.asmx'. 

To sync, simply select the 'Upload Feeds...' or 'Download Feeds...' command from the tools menu.

No idea, why I haven't seen this, yet. But this option finally allows my keep my online Blogroll up-to-date with a few mouse clicks.

Dana Coffey created a list of 25 tools you might also helpful. Nice list, though.

"With traveling and use of many different computers, many geeks (and geek girls) often find a need to have a uniform set of tools handy wherever we may be. I've put together a list of 25 invaluable portable apps that can be installed on an Ipod or Thumb Drive. These are really cool!"

Amer Gerzic created a great plug-in to format source code while writing a post in Windows  Live Writer.

You simply paste the code into the plug-in Window, specify the appearance of the code snippet.

 

He supports a wide range of languages within this plug-in which makes it so interesting. Currently supported languages are ASPX, C, C#, C++, COBOL, Cold Fusion, CSS, Eiffel, Fortran, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, JScript, Mercury, MSIL, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, SQL, Visual Basic, Visual Basic Script, XML.

Jon DeVaan and Steven Sinofsky, both senior managers for the upcoming Windows 7, are hosting a blog called Engineering Windows 7, inviting everybody to comment about the future development of the new Windows platform. Actually, they only request to follow a few guidelines that however should be self-evident following a certain netiquette.

"We’re excited about this blog. As active bloggers on Microsoft’s intranet we are both looking forward to turning our attention and blogging energies towards the community outside Microsoft. We know the ins and outs of blogging and expect to have fun, provide great information, and also make a few mistakes. We know we’ll misspeak or what we say will be heard differently than we intended. We’re not worried. All we ask is that we have a dialog based on mutual respect and the shared goal of making a great release of Windows 7."

Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/

Or whatever other language you prefer. Windows Live Translator went online and allows you to translate what other people are talking about you.

Windows Live Translator Button a chance. First you need to install the Windows Live Toolbar and add the button that, by the way looks like the following:

Especially for my mum, I am also going to add a translator button directly to my blog. The code can be found here. Simply adding the code to the dasBlog home template and here we go.

For some days it looks like there are some issues with the Akismet API. A couple of SPAM entries found their way into my blog not being monitored by the service at all. Now I decided to give ReverseDOS a try.

It's a small HttpModule developed by Michael K. Campbell. Let's see what he is going to say about ReverseDOS:

"ReverseDOS is a very simple HttpModule that checks various parts of incoming requests against a list of crap that you don't want pushed on to your site. If ReverseDOS detects a match, it attempts to stall the requesting client for a number of seconds (specified in a .config file). During this loop, which uses virtually no server resources - and only a tiny smidgen of bandwidth, ReverseDOS checks every .3 seconds to see if the client is still connected. If the spammer disconnects, good riddance. If the spammer sticks around, they're finally rewarded with the Response Headers - containing an HTTP 403 - Access Denied Response Code."

Does not sound too bad, does it? Since I run my own server now it is a cinch to get it run. Deployment is quite easy, copying the bits, the configuration file and adding one line to your Web.config. Following the installation instructions, it took a few minutes to get everything set up. So far, it looks like it runs fine with dasBlog 2.0. I'll give the default configuration file a try, before I see what to add there.

The careful observer realized that I am using Twitter for microblogging for a while. I tried a couple of tools such as Twadget for the Vista sidebar. I created also some Jabber account to post using the IM feature of Twitter. Jabber doesn't work for me since I can't connect to the server from within corporate network. The tool I finally ended up with is Twhirl. I haven't found any time to play with all the features. It is based on Adobe's ARI runs quite smooth and makes it a lot more fun to twitter. Only fact I am disappointed about is the footprint of almost 30 MB. Anyway, the tool is worth a look if you are using Twitter especially since it is also available for Mac OSX. Go and try it and follow me.

It was quite a busy week with little time to write. However, I met Benjamin Schröter who does quite interesting stuff with the Microsoft DSL Tools. Added to blogroll.

I still wonder why I can't use the switch-statement on typeof in C#?! Finally, I found Peter Hallam answering to this. Irrespectively his arguments, it works for the try-catch-finally statement quite well. So why not for switch?! 

Yibo Hui (徐艺波) blogged about having al look at my (foreign) desk. Quite interesting where your blog entries end up, though. 

Looking around for some cross-post plug-in for a while, I came along this plug-in for Windows Live Writer. Nice idea, but it actually does not load in WLW.

Right now, it is the only plug-in I found so far. I filed the bug and now I am waiting for any response. If nothing happens I have to have a look myself. Thanks for putting it under Ms-PL. If anybody get this plug-in working, let me know.

It is finally done. After some exiting days I moved my web site, blog and domain to my own server. A few seconds I was informed about the succeeded the domain transfer. Now I am just waiting that all the DNS are updated. Since everything is already set up and prepared for the domain name, the master plan is accomplished.

1. Got root
2. Install VMware
3. Install a Windows Server 2008
4. Move my existing site to the new server

In to make sure such a relocation goes off without a hitch just follow a few simple rules

1. Terminate the contract with our current provider, best in written form or by fax
2. Inform your current provider about the domain transfer
3. Request the domain transfer with your new provider
4. Set up your Web applications on the new site - test it!
5. Make the site listening to the domain name to be moved.
6. Make sure you have some mail server set up already listening to the domain name being moved.

That's all.

Some words on the Secure Development Lifecycle related to Web 2.0 by Bryan Sullivan.

Last week I spend at Microsoft's TechFest presenting the work done at Microsoft Research Cambridge over the lat 12 months. Rob Knies gives a overall insight into our research at the community sites of Microsoft Research. I just surfed onto another article written by Briony Smith for itWorldCanada telling about what we showed there, well as the official press statement about our research.

After reading about dzone [1] in Matthias' blog [2], I signed up an account there and published my first article [3]. Having only a very quick look on this portal, it looks to me like one of those few, providing additional value.

[1] http://www.dzone.com/
[2] http://unmaintainable.wordpress.com/2007/12/22/one-year-of-blogging/
[3] http://www.dzone.com/links/wcf_net_35_and_http_request_content.html

Windows Live Writer [1] is finally available.

[1] http://get.live.com/writer/overview

Last week I took of a week to finish a couple of personal things, therefore nothing really interesting happened so far. There is a Windows Sidebar Refresh [1], which cold be worth a look. Reading Scott Hanselman's Reading to Be a Better Developer [2] I think about introducing a daily code-review hour. In fact I completely support that you become only a good coder if you read really a lot of code. Writing code is hard, reading it should hard, too. Really? Matthias had some thought on comments in source code [3] which is directly linked to writing code. Something to pick up later on.

Back to normal...

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/windowssdk/...
[2] http://www.hanselman.com/blog/...
[3] http://unmaintainable.wordpress.com/...

What's all about

The widgets offered by Last.fm are not really customizable. The latest Flash-based quilts are literally flashy and the image-based charts are quite unconvincingly to design. So I sat down wrote a small ASP.NET control to be used as Last.fm Widget with the goal to use it within my dasBlog installation. For that reason I made usage of the data feeds provided by Last.fm.

 

Prerequisites

1. You need a Last.fm account which you can create here.
   
   
2. You might want to download any media player plug-ins from here to scrobble your music.

How to install on a ASP.NET Web Application

1. Download the .zip file and unpack it's content into your web application's directory.
   
   
2. Add the following line below your page tag to register the control with your ASP.NET web page:

   <%@ Register Src="LastFmControl.ascx" TagName="lastfm" TagPrefix="uc" %>

3. At the place where you want to add the control similar to

   <uc:lastfm 
     id="Lastfm1" 
     runat="server" 
     Url="http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/aheil/recenttracks.xml"
     User="http://www.last.fm/user/aheil/">
   </uc:lastfm>

4. Change the username from aheil to your username unless you want to display my recently played music on your site.

How to install on a dasBlog installation

1. Download the .zip file an unpack it's content into your dasBlog installation directory.
   
   
2. Open the hometemplate.blogtemplate file of your dasBlog theme and use the ASPNETControl makro to add the control on the page.

   <%newtelligence.ASPNETControl("LastFmControl.ascx")%>

3. Open the LastFmcontrol.ascx.cs file and change the username at

   private string _url 
     = "http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/aheil/recenttracks.xml";

and


private string _user 
  = "http://www.last.fm/user/aheil/";

unless you want to display my recently played music on your blog.

How to Customize

The control makes heavy usage of several CSS div classes to be maximum customizable. The classes used are

.lastFmMain {}
.lastFmHeader{}
.lastFmItem {}
.lastFmItemTitle {}
.lastFmItemArtist {}
.lastFmFooter {}

Simply modify and add these div classes in your CSS file to make the control look seamless integrating into your web page.

The classes are used as following where the lastFmItem is reapeating.

Download

• Download .zip file (3KB)

Some Comments

I did not spent much effort into this control. Writing this entry took longer that writing the control, not only since the pre-release Windows Live Writer versiopn I am using crashed twice. There are several improvements, which could be done to this control, including reducing the paramters to only the user name, adding the Last.fm icon etc. If you are looking for a more sophisticated dasBlog makro, you might have a look at Alexander Groß' Last.fm makro, which I was pointed to wafter I had written the above one.

Share this post :

I just spend some minutes this evening updating the LibraryThing Widget CSS styles.

The DIV classes used by LibraryThing are as follows:

.LTwrapper
.LTheader
.LTitem 
.LTprovided

LTwrapper is for the whole widget, LTheader only for the "Random books I have" line, Ltitem for each book and finally .LTprovided for the footer "powered by LibraryThing".

However, to get some more flexibility in the layout you should make usage of the cascading property in CSS and define the .LTitem img class to position the images. It could look like the following then:

.LTitem img
{
  float: right;
  margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px;
}

Charles Miller came up with a great explanation about the words impossible, trivial, feasible, hard and very-hard when used by engineers. Worth reading it.

Windows Live Writer is for sure the current highlight in blogging tools. The Windows Live Writer Gallery brings a whole bunch of extensions to Windows Live Writer which make it even better. Especially the digital ink and Visual Studio plug-ins look promising... pending for further investigation.

Source: http://gallery.live.com/default.aspx?pl=8

I just decided to sit down on Monday mornings and summarize a couple of things. Hence this morning I had a look at the blog-o-sphere.

Iman, a friend from UK just stated his own blog. I am looking forward to read what he has to say. Damir once again became MVP. I am wondering why I never become a MVP... Otherwise, the blog-o-sphere was quite silent this week. I guess Clemens is busy with his daughter right now and BtK is not blogging for ages... Martin Calsyn, our architect also has a rarely used blog. Since I have still some issues with the encoding in categories within the DasBlog engine, Alexander started to help me in finding out why... Guess what? He has a blog, too.

Finally,I set up my Technorati Profile. And this is just the blog claim posting...

DasBlog does finally support Gravatars [1]. One step more away from the anonym beginnings of the web. Check the comments of this blog entry to view how they work. Definitely another Web 2.0 application. Gravatars can be easy added to any weblog:

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an 80×80 pixel avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs?

 

[1] http://site.gravatar.com/

Just 24h after I have upgraded my site to the DasBlog engine 1.9.7174.0 daily build, build 1.9.174.1 was release as stable. The work is going on and Clemens [1] gives a first impression on what is happening in the future:

Once the project switches over to be "native" on the CLR/BCL 2.0 (we're discussing the actual target framework version), I'll rejoin the effort and I already have several truckloads of new features or changes in the wait loop. You'll be surprised what that little engine will learn to do over the next several months.... ;)

[1] http://vasters.com/clemensv/PermaLink,guid,62191618-0f0f-4017-bfe4-f6577c8db0f6.aspx

While a dozen RSS feeds are subscribed in your favorite feed reader, you might be interested only in some particular feeds being updated during the day. Windows Live Alerts [1] give you this new experience. If you want to get a alert within Windows Live Messenger when aheil.de blog is updated, simply click the Windows Live Alerts button on the menu pane. Definitely a Web 2.0 application.

[1] http://alerts.live.com/

dasBlog" src="http://blog.aheil.de/content/binary/dasBlogupgrade_DEA/DasBlogReflection50x56Gray_thumb5.gif" width="50" align="right">It has been a bit quite on this site for the last time. However, aheil.de is not sharing the half life of many other web sites. aheil.de is now running a weblog for more than 4 years. So it was time to upgrade the dasBlog [1] engine to a recent daily build. Just a few minutes ago aheil.de was upgraded to the dasBlog 1.9.7174.0 build. A complete backup of all previous posts was necessary in order to get the new build correctly running. Former posts will be uploaded step-by-step in the next future.

[1] http://www.dasblog.info/

Clemens Vasters just wrote about federated services in his blog [1]. Sounds familiar? Of course. I spend a lot of time two years ago in investigating in Web Service Federations including soft- and hardware in my research [2] at the IT-Management and Web Engineering Research Group (MWRG) [3]. At this time it was quite hard to explain to people what a Web Service federation actually is supposed to mean. We had a look deep into a couple of technologies. E.g., we allowed to connect uPnP devices with non-uPnP services across organizational boundaries, we used off-the-shelf Phidgets [4] devices to control simulated Intel uPnP services.  Unfortunately, WCF was not that stable at this time to use it as infrastructure for our approach even if we started to build upon it in the beginning.

[1] http://friends.newtelligence.net/clemensv/...
[2] http://www.aheil.de/research.aspx
[3] http://mwrg.tm.uni-karlsruhe.de/
[4] http://www.phidgets.com/

Need a (almost) full list off ping servers to be used in Windows Live Writer? At [1] I found the following list...

http://1470.net/api/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping.php
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/pingPodcast
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc/
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://pingqueue.com/rpc/
http://ping.blogg.de/
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.britblog.com/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://rpc.wpkeys.com/
http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx
http://signup.alerts.msn.com/alerts-PREP/submitPingExtended.doz
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.holycowdude.com/rpc/ping/
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://www.imblogs.net/ping/
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

[1] http://okaq.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!6B4E54BBBC285F4E!2262.entry

Jeremy Hermann's is my blogger of the day. During de-pressurization and emergency landing procedures [1] this guy kept calm and started making pictures for his blog...

[1] http://jeremyhermanns.org/me/alaska-flight-536-rapid-de-pressurization-and-panic-at-30k-feet/

Today I found some time to upgrade my dasBlog version to 1.9.6264.0. The upgrade is straightforward as described in [1], however I lost the comments on the articles for some unknown reasons.

[1] http://www.dasblog.info/SetupInstall.aspx

Niels Lohmann [1] did a video of the closing session [2], given by Sir Tony Hoare [3] at a Summer School in 2006. Even if I passed his way several times over here in Cambridge, it's great to see this video. Good job Niels.

"At the International Summer School Marktoberdorf 2006, Tony Hoare was asked to give the talk at the closing session. He gave a lot of advices for Ph.D. students, and I am glad I made a video of it to share these advices"

[1] http://niels.ebytehost.com/ 
[2] http://niels.ebytehost.com/videos/advice-for-phd-students-from-tony-hoare
[3] http://research.microsoft.com/users/thoare/

Finally I found some minutes to update the design of my welbog. The design is now the same as the webpage and the weblog is integrated into the site. However there is some finetuning left, I have to do during the next few days. Basically I did manage to replace the dasBlog theme CSS by the one I use for the homepage. since the layout is similar, I just had to modify some of the CSS classes in the dasBlog templates.

Live Writer [1] seems to be a quite nifty tool for offline blogging. The installations process is quite easy.

Also the handling of the tool is quite intuitive. And the support for adding images is awesome. Since I use shoadows for all my images I am quite pleased that Live Writer does support this feature which saves me some time while blogging.

[1] http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/

There is a new blogging tool for offline blogging. Actually something I was waiting for a long time. Most of the tools I have tried until now usually did not support some essential funcitons I required.

"Windows Live Writer is a desktop application that makes it easier to compose compelling blog posts using Windows Live Spaces or your current blog service." [1]

So I will try soo its compatibility with dasBlog.

[1] http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/

Two months ago, when I just arrived at Seattle, someone was accosting me from behind. It was Damir Tomicic. So you have to travel 10,000 of miles to meet people... Let's see what he has to say: blogroll += http://tomicic.de/.

Three weeks ago I spent an evening together with Clemens Vasters at the University Arms' bar in Cambridge, UK. Great guy, just added him to my blogroll. Two months ago he joined Microsoft as Community Relations Program Manager for the Windows Communication Foundation: Hey Clemens, I still want to put in the WCF into our VRDK!

I remember now one of the issues with w.bloggar: After doing all this setup stuff for the FTP, closing w.bloggar and starting the tool again, all the entries are gone. Well, if I have to rewrite all the settings again after I closed the tool it looks somehow stupid to me.

I'm getting really angry because of all the trackback spam I received during the last few days. I think I will write a small application that removes all the spam as soon as I have some time left. Until then I have to disable the trackback service.

Trackbacks explained [1] in a non-technical way...

[1] http://www.movabletype.org/trackback/beginners/

I found a blog entry written by the C# Team, about how to to update user interface from a thread that did not create it [1]? This blog about C# questions could be really awesome, but unfortunately the entries are once in a blue moon.

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/csharpfaq/archive/2004/03/17/91685.aspx
[2] http://blogs.msdn.com/csharpfaq/default.aspx

There has been a problem with FTP for a while. The Color Picker as well as the Image Browser did not wanted to work properly! The solution can be found there:

"Finally ...

Thanks to Kenneth Solberg (http://www.khix.net), the FTB Web Dialogs finally do work !

The Hack (noticed that I didnt use the word solution):

1) Save a copy of the web.config file from the dasBlog root to the ftb directory

2) Open up that web.config file from the ftb directory.

3) Edit the Authorization Config section to such:
<authorization>
 <allow users="*" />
 </authorization>

4) Remove the Authentication Elements from the config file.

5) Save the File.

6) Save a copy of the SiteConfig Folder and Contents from the dasBlog root to the ftb directory as well.

7) Refresh and Click on the Font-Fore Color, Font-Back Color and Insert Code Buttons of the FreeTextBox and watch the wonderful Web Dialog pop up successfully.

I would never have figured out why and how as there was absolutely no written documentation anywhere (that I could find anyways...)"

Source: gotdotnet Messageboard

Jetzt, da die echte Domain für sämtliche Request verwendet werden kann, habe ich begonnen einige kleine Probleme auf der Seite zu beheben. Ein Problem trat regelässig auf, wenn man im Kalender von dasBLog einen Tag ausgewählt hatte. dasBlog ruft darauf die Seite default.aspx?date= auf. Natürlich klappt das nicht, wenn die default.aspx Seite in blog.aspx umbenannt wurde. Wie fast alle in .NET kann das Problem mit einem Dreizeiler gelöst werden:

if (Request.QueryString["date"] != null)
{
    string query = "blog.aspx?date=" + Request.QueryString["date"];
    Server.Transfer(query);
}

Das reicht und jeder Request der auf der Startseite eingeht und vom Kalender stammt wird abgebochen und es wird anstelle dessen die Seite blog.aspx zurückgeliefert. Beliebig verfeinern lässt sich das Ganze, indem beispielweise noch auf die Referrer-Url abgefragt wird. Eine Bedingung in der Form

Request.UrlReferrer.ToString().Substring("blog.aspx") < 0

genügt da schon.

Hack The Planet!