January 2006 - Mike Taulty's Blog

I'm pretty new to Sparkle. I've been aware of it for quite a long time and I've played with various versions along the way but, today, I sat down and went through the tutorials that come with the Jan CTP and I was absolutely blown away by it. It's not often that a piece of software surprises me like this, but this thing is looking really, really cool - it seems to me the perfect combination of the power of the WPF platform and a great tool. I was so impressed with what I managed to achieve by following the tutorial that I thought I'd record it and put it up here. Take a look - here's the WMV . If you've got WinFX then go visit http://www.microsoft.com/expression to grab a preview of Sparkle. If you've not got WinFX, go get it ;-)

Following on from this post , now I've got my new RSS feed created if I want to go and download it I can do a quick; MSH feeds:\Renamed New Feeds> invoke-item "Mike Taulty" and then drop into that folder and do a quick dir to see what items are available on that feed and then view one of the items MSH feeds:\Renamed New Feeds> cd 'Mike Taulty' MSH feeds:\Renamed New Feeds\Mike Taulty> dir | format-list Title, Link, PubData << Snip >> Title : PowerPoint 12 Link : http://mtaulty.com/blog/archive/2006/01/24/9094.aspx << Snip >> MSH feeds:\Renamed New Feeds\Mike Taulty> invoke-item "PowerPoint 12" I have that list invoke-item command wired up to fire up IE at this point with the posting details.

Following up on this post , if I want to create new folders for feeds to live in so that I can subscribe to new feeds then I can go ahead and do that; MSH feeds:\Technology\Mike Taulty's Weblog> cd .. MSH feeds:\Technology> cd .. MSH feeds:\> mkdir NewFeeds MshPath : RssCmdletProvider::\NewFeeds MshParentPath : RssCmdletProvider::\ MshChildName : NewFeeds MshDrive : feeds MshProvider : RssCmdletProvider MshIsContainer : True Name : NewFeeds TotalItemCount : 0 TotalUnreadItemCount : 0 MSH feeds:\> cd NewFeeds MSH feeds:\NewFeeds> cd .. MSH feeds:\> $folder = get-item "NewFeeds" MSH feeds:\> $folder.Name = "Renamed New Feeds" MSH feeds:\> dir | format-list Name Name : Renamed New Feeds Name : Technology Name : UK Bloggers on MSDN MSH feeds:\> cd 'Renamed New Feeds' MSH feeds:\Renamed New Feeds>

Following up on this post , if I want to navigate around my feed store a little then it feels just like the file system, I chose to make folders and feeds both feel like directories. MSH feeds:\> cd Technology MSH feeds:\Technology> dir | format-list Title, XmlUrl Title : savas blog XmlUrl : http://savas.parastatidis.name/feeds/rss.aspx Title : A Byte Of Life XmlUrl : http://www.ianwij.com/weblog/rss.aspx << Truncated output here as it gets a bit long… >> Title : Mike Taulty's Weblog XmlUrl : http://mtaulty.com/blog/Rss.aspx MSH feeds:\Technology> cd "Mike Taulty's Weblog" MSH feeds:\Technology\Mike Taulty's Weblog> dir | format-list Title, PubDate, Link << Truncated output here as it gets a bit long… >> Title : Full-Fat Office Updates PubDate : 1/29/2006 5:07:00 AM Link : http://mtaulty.com/blog/archive/2006/01/29/9111.aspx << Truncated output here as it gets a bit long… >>

Following up on this post , here's how I can see that my new provider is up and active within the Monad shell; ********************** MSH Transcript Start ********************** Transcript started, output file is w:\temp\trans.txt MSH W:\development\monad\RssProvider\RssProvider\bin\Debug> get-provider Name Capabilities Drives ---- ------------ ------ RssCmdletProvider None {feeds} Alias ShouldProcess {Alias} Environment ShouldProcess {Env} FileSystem Filter, ShouldProcess {C, D, E, W, F, G, O} Function ShouldProcess {Function} Registry ShouldProcess {HKLM, HKCU} Variable ShouldProcess {Variable} Certificate ShouldProcess {cert} This lets me know that the root of my "RSS drive" is called feeds.

I've been writing demos with WPF over the last couple of days and I knocked together something very simple to show some interoperability between Windows Forms and WPF. I thought I'd share it here as it's (at least to me) illustrative of how smart the object model is within the WPF - in about 10 lines of code I'm doing both a simplistic version of hosting WPF in Windows Forms and I'm also dynamically loading up some XAML and turning it into an object graph at runtime (I should say that I'm doing practically no work here and it's the WPF that's doing the lot). Here's a picture of the application - this is a Windows Forms application where you can type some XAML into the right hand pane and it gets displayed in the left hand pane. I've done nothing to make this smart or clever but I thought I'd share anyway. This is January CTP WinFX stuff. Project file is here .

Marcus and I did an MSDN evening event last night down at the Microsoft Campus in Reading covering off introductory materials on WinFX. It felt like a good event to me - a fairly packed room of about 100 or so people (the room maxes out at about 120) and people seemed interested in what they were seeing. In some ways an event like this where we spend 2 hours talking about a subject as big as WinFX is quite a challenge and probably more so for the people that attend than the presenter as there's just so much stuff to try and take in all in one go. Marcus did a great job of talking about the Windows Presentation Foundation and I did a shoe-horn style job of trying to squeeze the WCF and the WF into a single hour which is a little bit tricky. I'm hoping that the MSDN events this year will allow us to spend a lot more time on these technologies as I think they're worthy of a whole tonne of investigation and people will want detail before they're prepared to bet their applications on them - it's not sufficient to deliver...

I'm writing some code today that looks a little bit like this; this .title = feed.Title; this .xmlUrl = feed.url; this .pubDate = feed.PubDate; It's basically a copy of a bunch of properties from one object to another. The problem is that each one of the property accessors on the "source" object might throw an exception but I want as many of the properties copied across as possible with default values supplied if the property accessor throws. Initially I find myself writing this kind of thing; try { this .title = feed.Title; } catch { } try { this .xmlUrl = feed.url; } catch { } But then I find that's getting boring really quickly so I try and find a slightly better solution and end up with something that looks like this; public delegate T CodeDelegate <T>(); class Utility { public static T TryCode<T>( CodeDelegate <T> d) { T returnValue = default (T); try { returnValue = d(); } catch { } return (returnValue); } } and using it something like this; this .title = Utility .TryCode< string >...