Greg Reinacker’s Weblog

Yep, we’re still looking for great Windows and .NET developers.  Turns out it’s pretty hard to find folks with the depth of knowledge we’re looking for.  Most recently, Gordon has joined us (welcome!), but we still need more help.

So I thought I might list a few questions that our ideal candidate wouldn’t have too many problems with. Does this describe you?

• You know the difference between _beginthreadex and CreateThread.
• You know all of the ways to share memory between Win32 processes.  (hint – it’s a short list.) (another hint - it’s a really short list.)
• You know what an AppDomain is, and you can think of a reason you might want to create one yourself.
• You know what a HttpModule is, and you can think of at least two examples of why you might use one.
• You know what Mutexes and Semaphores are used for. (hint – they don’t magically enable sharing stuff between threads.)
• You know you can override member functions in C++ without them being declared virtual; and you know when and why you should declare them virtual.
• You can explain the difference between:
   
     A::A() {m_x = 5;}
   
  and
   
     A::A() : m_x(5) { }
   
• When someone asks you to write code on a whiteboard to reverse a string in place, you’re disappointed that they didn’t ask a more interesting question.
• You know that IL isn’t interpreted.
• You can explain transaction isolation levels as they relate to SQL Server.
• You know what the Running Object Table is, and can think of situations when you might want to use it.
• You want to work with an amazing team of folks who thought I shouldn’t have put such easy questions on my blog.
• If you’re not already here, you’re interested in relocating to Colorado.

I while back, I wrote an application to generate RSS feeds from Visual SourceSafe databases. The code was set to expire a few months later, as we were considering building this capability into a product. A couple more times after that, I posted updated versions with a later and later expiration.

Well, I’m happy to announce that we’ve decided to release the source code for this application. It requires .NET 1.1, and build files are included for Visual Studio .NET 2003.

This really is a cool app…it runs as a Windows service, and generates RSS feeds based on the change logs in VSS. And now it’s free, unlimited, and ready for you to play with. :-) The copyright and license are included in the readme.rtf in the package below – basically, it’s an unrestricted modification and redistribution license.

download source: VssRssSvc.zip

There have been a whole lot of posts about Halo 2 being released…but Scott Hanselman’s post about getting game stats via RSS certainly caught my eye.

Tom Walker took it one step further…if you look on the left side of his blog, you’ll see his latest stats right there in his sidebar.  He’s taking the Bungie RSS feeds, and re-publishing the latest two games on his blog, using NewsGator Online’s “Headlines” feature. Very cool, Tom!

Here’s what you would need to do, in a nutshell, to publish Halo 2 stats (or any other feed’s content, for that matter) on your blog:

1. Subscribe to the feed in NewsGator Online

2. Go to the “Edit Locations” section under NewsGator Manager.

3. Create a new location, perhaps called “Halo feed only”. Set the “don’t automatically add feeds” option, and click “Feeds” and remove all of the feeds from this location except the one(s) you want to republish.

4. Click “Headlines”, and enable and configure the template to republish the headlines.

5. Copy the javascript on the headlines page to your blog.

That’s it!  I’m using it on my own site for “recent comments” (which shows latest content from my own comments feed) and also “where have I been”, which is from a photoblog I’m playing with (more about this later).

Give it a try yourself!

Monday was a big day for me.

A few weeks ago, J.B. (our CEO) mentioned the idea of doing an “Enterprise RSS” weblog. I told him it sounded like a great idea to me, and promptly moved on to other things and forgot about it. (Those of you who know me know about my amazing memory skills – heh!)

On Monday, I was sitting in on a conference call, reading feeds on my phone with NewsGator Mobile edition. In my keyword search feed for “NewsGator”, I saw the following come up:

We here at NewsGator have decided to create a weblog focused on Enterprise use of RSS. We’re going to…

Imagine my surprise.  We did?!?  Who wrote that?  How did I not know about it?  WTF?!?

Monday was a big day. It was the first day since starting this company in 2002 (in a spare bedroom) that I realized I didn’t actually know every detail about everything that was going on.

Big picture? Yes. Execution details? Not always.

And that’s a good thing!  We have a lot going on in parallel, and we have a great team who knows how to execute on our plans.  What more could I ask? :-)

After lots of complaints (and many, many more via email and other channels), we’ve changed the way the folder organization GUI works in NewsGator Online. It’s now easy to organize feeds into folders, and do it with multiple feeds at a time.

Thanks to everyone that has provided feedback on the new system – keep it coming! There have actually been lots of changes, getting loaded several times per week…so your feedback is definitely being heard and acted on, even if we don’t publicly mention it. :-)

With the recent popularity of podcasting, there have been a lot of questions and comments as to NewsGator’s support for enclosures. Let me try to clear this up.

NewsGator Outlook Edition – supports enclosures in two different ways. By default, it will not download enclosures, but rather will put a link to the file in the message body.

However…it can be configured to download the enclosure automatically. To do this, go to NewsGator/Subscriptions, select the feed(s) you want and click Edit. Go to the Options tab, and enable the “automatically download enclosures/attachments” option. That’s it – after doing this, enclosures in the selected feeds will be downloaded and stored in Outlook as attachments.

You may want them in your file system instead of in Outlook, so you can auto-sync them to a portable device. There’s an Outlook add-in called Outlook Attachment Sniffer, which will save these attachments into a folder for you. Many thanks to Michael Greth for pointing this out!

NewsGator Web Edition – displays enclosures as a link within the item.

NewsGator Email Edition – displays enclosures as a link within the item.

NewsGator Media Center Edition – supports on-demand streaming of audio and video enclosures…screen shots are at

http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/ad_mediacenter.aspx

The 4th through 7th images are all showing how video content looks when there is a video enclosure in a feed (screen shots are based on the Channel 9 feed).