... or why does your tool introduce bugs in my code and doesn't warn me?

When migrating an ASP.NET 1.1 project to 2.0, using the VS 2005 (SP1) conversion wizard and the Web Application Project conversion tool (included in service pack 1), the AutoEventWireup @page attribute is set to "True" for all pages, even when you previously had set it to "False".

This potentially breaks your application, when you have eventhandlers for init/load/prerender bound manually in places where the conversion tool doesn't change them, e.g. in the constructor of a common basepage. This will cause the events to be handled twice, with unexpected results.

The problem is not that the default is changed from 1.1 to 2.0, but that by modifying my code the tool introduces new (interesting) bugs. And all this without a big neon-sign, which warns for the changes being made and the potential problems it introduces.

BlogML is an XML format for storing the contents of a blog; either for archival or migrating to a different blogging engine.

BlogML currently supports the following engines:

• Community Server
• Subtext
• SingleUserBlog

And I finished a beta implementation for dasBlog today.

The current BlogML format does not support all the features dasBlog has, so the following information is lost when exporting your blog using BlogML:

• Post specific languages; the language information for a post made in a different language than the default is lost;
• Only trackbacks are exported; Pingbacks and referrals are lost; 
• Attachments are not imported in this build;
• Some properties of comments are lost (useragent, ip of user);

The current driver program is very basic, and requires some hacking to switch between import- and export-mode.

Note: although dasBlog is a .Net 1.1 project, this is written using .Net 2.0 as per the BlogML project.

download: dasblogml.zip

Via: Freakonomics Blog

"If you are designing a piece of tech gear - be it hardware or software - and you need to choose an arbitrary limit or range for something, make sure the limit is either 2^n or 2^n - 1."

Source: Eric Gunnerson

Omar has decided we have waited long enough and has released dasBlog 1.9.6264. You can find the changelog and more information than you could ever want at Scott Hanselman's blog.

The best new feature in iTunes 7 is the cover art browser, the not so good feature is the fact that it doesn't work so good on Windows Vista. So after moving back to Mediaplayer and missing the cover art, which takes forever to download for a decent sized library in iTunes. I put together this codesnippet, which lets downloads the cover art from the iTunes store for the specified artist/album.

The interesting part is the headers you have to send with your request:

request.Headers.Add("X-Apple-Tz", "7200");
request.Headers.Add("X-Apple-Store-Front", "143457");
request.Headers.Add("Accept-Language", "en-us, en;q=0.50");
request.Headers.Add("Accept-Encoding", "gzip, x-aes-cbc");
request.UserAgent = "iTunes/7.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.4.7)";
request.AutomaticDecompression = DecompressionMethods.GZip;

Also note that the HttpWebRequest class automatically decompresses the response.

Program.cs (3.44 KB)Program.txt (3.44 KB)

Note: this code is based on the perl library by Jesper Nøhr and works as long as Apple doesn't change anything.

Test post from word…

Word supports the MetaWebLog API in the latest release, which one of my co-workers got late last night (thanks Stef).

"Always-fresh" releases of dasBlog are available from http://www.paulvanbrenk.com/blog/bits. These builds are made from the subversion head hourly, so these may not be the most stable, but are the most recent.

Changelog for dasBlog 1.9.

If you want to make a contribution check out this article by Scott Hanselman, about contributing a patch to dasBlog.

Frank just started his new blog and his first post details how to work with control adapters in SPS2007. Very good stuff.