The whole tagging concept is growing on me. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could tag contacts on MSN Messenger (or any other IM client) too? Contact groups is nice, but it’s been around for a while, and based on the old fashioned file-folder idea. Many contacts fall into multiple categories. I’d like to be able to tag people on my contact list by ‘relationship’ (ie. Friends, Family, Co-Workers, etc) and ‘location’.

Another use of tagging could be to tag contacts by TV shows they like. For example, say you’ve got a bunch of contacts on your list who watch Lost. Come Wednesday night, after the show has aired, it would be handy to click on ‘Lost’ and ‘Online’ tags, and have a group chat about the show

Maybe this’ll be a feature we’ll see in the next version of MSN Messenger, though I’d also be happy seeing it in Trillian. It doesn’t seem like a particularly complex feature request, so perhaps Patchou can build this into the excellent MsgPlus add-in for MSN Messenger?

First heard about Flock from Lee Wilkins, and then again from Stewart Rogers, so I figured I’d download it and see what the fuss is about.

Having just spent the past few months working away on a project, where I saw the front-end developer go through hell to get a website to be fully compliant with a range of web browsers, as well as meet the demands of the web designer, ensuring pixel accuracy, a new web browser is the last thing I wanted to worry about.

Fortunately, Flock is based around FireFox, which has good CSS support, etc. It’s the same engine, with some nice extra features built in, such as integration with del.icio.us. The team decided to start with something new to deliver a completely new user experience, as opposed to building a FireFox extension, where their options are somewhat limited.

It does seem like a nice browser – I’m using it now to write this blog entry. It feels very similar to FireFox, and the integration with Del.icio.us is definitely a great selling point (I’m actually surprised that no-one has built a plug-in for Internet Explorer yet).

With Internet Explorer still dominating over 90% of the market, and FireFox at 8%, it’ll be interesting to see what kind of impact Flock can make.

For many years, I’ve been using the excellent Startup Control Panel utility by Michael Lin, which is great for managing the myriad of applications which start up with windows, whether it be through the startup folder, system registry, etc. I’ve recommended this to countless people, and it’s been an essential tool when manually cleaning machines ridden with spyware and viruses.

Somewhat less user friendly but far more powerful is Sysinternals Autoruns. This not only allows you to view all applications loading on Startup, it also displays all windows services, Internet Explorer addins, scheduled tasks, and other useful information.

This is definitely one of those must-have utilities. It’s worth installing it, and familiarising yourself with the applications that load up with Windows, removing any that aren’t necessary, and using this application as part of your housecleaning activities to ensure that your system startup stays clean and tidy.

There’s always going to be applications which try and hijack your system. My recent frustration was with Apple’s Quicktime, which refused to go away, despite being deleted from my system startup time and time again. Finally, renaming qttask.exe to qttask.old fixed my problem. There’s lots more information on windows annoyances at annoyances.org.

Although it’s been out for a little while, I just got round to upgrading to Skype 1.4, which finally offers call forwarding. Coupled with a SkypeIn number, this has lots of great possibilities. It’s now possible to have a local phone number in locations all over the globe, which could route through to a mobile phone in the user’s location, allowing them to calls without being stuck in front of a computer.

My only minor frustration is that the phone has to ring for quite a while before the call forwarding kicks in, by which point, many callers might just hang up. Hope this is something which Skype improve on, as it has the potential to become an issue. But that aside, the service is superb.

I’m yet to try the Gizmo Softphone , though the call forwarding feature does seem like a good reason to stick with Skype, at least for now.

Following months of legal wrangling with Independent International Investment Research PLC over the GMail name, Google has lost the battle, and been forced to change the name of its email service to Google Mail in the UK. Both Google and IIIR Group have released press releases.

Google’s press release indicates that only UK users are affected, and sadly, we may lose our @gmail.com addresses. However, using GoogleMail in the UK and GMail everywhere else is only bound to add to the confusion. Interesting debate going on at Slashdot. It seems like Google may only restrict the Gmail domain in the UK, though it does all depend how things work out in the courts.

With any luck, we’ll all be able to keep our GMail addresses. I really don’t want to go through all the hassle of updating all of my online accounts yet again with a new email address, without any benefit this time.

I’ve been wanting to write an article for CodeProject for some time, and decided to start with something simple. I’ve been working with DataGrids quite a lot recently, and decided to subclass it and improve the pager to include some additional data about the data being viewed. Hence, my first article is about customising the datagrid pager in ASP.NET.

This being my first article, and hopefully the start of many more to come, any reader comments or suggestions would be most appreciated. Get in touch is via any of the methods listed on the contact page.

I’ve been using the excellent dp.SyntaxHighlighter on my blog for a while now, to apply code highlighting to blog entries. This simply involves wrapping the code sample in a textare tag with the css class specifying the language, and the entry automatically gets parsed by a javascript function which executes at the end of each page.

Works great, until the entry is viewed in a [web-based] RSS reader, where the textarea remains a textarea, and not only doesn’t have syntax highlighting, but is in a small textarea box with horizontal and vertical scrollbars. Ideally, we need a solution where we can use something like pre tags, which would result in the code being highlighted when viewed on the original website, and not highlighted but still readable when viewed through an RSS reader.

Fortunately, this is very easy to do. Simply modify your shCore.js file, and do a search for propertyName. By default, the value is ‘value’, but to make it work with pre tags, it should be changed to ‘innerText’. On pages with code, you should use <pre id=’code’ class=’c#’>…code…</pre>.

The only problem with this, is that if you’ve been using dp.SyntaxHighlighter already, and have old blog entries where you’ve used textareas, then these will no longer work. Hence, what we need to do is apply a conditional check to ensure that we use the correct property to retrieve the code.

Above the line highlighter.Highlight(element[propertyName]);, add the following line: var propertyName = (element.type == ‘textarea’) ? ‘value’ : ‘innerText’;. This will use the value property to retrieve the code to highlight if the element is a textarea, otherwise ‘innerText’ will be used (for pre tags).

So, Google has also got on the bandwaggon, and surprised us this week by the unexpected launch of Google Reader, a web based RSS reader with a futuristic interface built around the same snazzy AJAX interface we’re so used to now (and still impressed with) in GMail.

There’s an excellent in-depth review of Google Reader over at the unofficial Google weblog.

But, make no mistake, in it’s current form, Google Reader does not pose a threat to other online RSS readers like Bloglines and Newsgator Online.

Importing the 275+ RSS feeds I’m subscribed to took absolutely ages, and appeared to hang. Eventually, I gave up, closed the browser, re-opened it, and found that only around 60 entries had been imported.

Clicking on most of the blog titles in the list resulted in an error being displayed in the status bar – Could not find parameter ‘date’ in map ‘entry-template’. The beta status of this release is very visible.

There’s a host of other things which I don’t like either – unable to remove many feeds in one go, content search sucks, no grouping hierarchy (blogs can be tagged, but can’t see where this is displayed except managing subscriptions), etc.

Yes, this is a beta, but when Google give us high quality and usable betas like GMail, Google Groups, and Google News, we expect all their betas released to the public to be of similar quality. Admittedly, Google Reader is much more complex and user-focused [than Groups or News], but they still shouldn’t rush to market with a product that simply isn’t ready.

For now, I’m going to stick with Bloglines, which does everything I want to, and is a top notch online RSS reader. Will definitely be keeping my eye on Google Reader though. Although there’s no reason to switch now, things in this market change very quickly, and if Google listen to the feedback and refine their product, then moving from one RSS reader to another can be done very, very quickly.

A few friends in the past have asked me about posting XML to a url, using ASP.NET. This is usually on e-commerce sites, where details need to be posted to a secure site to process credit card details, etc.

Here’s a simple C# function which can post an XML document to a url and get the response. Can easily be modified to post dynamically generated XML (as you’ll probably want to do).

private string PostXmlAndGetResponse(string xmlfile, string url)
{
 WebRequest webRequest = null;
 WebResponse webResponse = null;
 string returnVal = string.Empty;
 try
 {
  webRequest = WebRequest.Create(url);
  webRequest.Method = "POST";
  webRequest.ContentType = "text/xml";
  string fileContents = string.Empty;
  using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(xmlfile))
  {
   fileContents = sr.ReadToEnd();
   sr.Close();
  }
  using (StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter(webRequest.GetRequestStream()))
  {
   sw.WriteLine(fileContents);
  }
  webResponse = webRequest.GetResponse();
  using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(webResponse.GetResponseStream()))
  {
   returnVal = sr.ReadToEnd();
   sr.Close();
  }
 }
 catch (Exception ex)
 {
  returnVal = string.Format("Error: {0}", ex.ToString());
 }
 finally
 {
  if (webRequest != null)
   webRequest.GetRequestStream().Close();
  if (webResponse != null)
   webResponse.GetResponseStream().Close();
 }
 return (returnVal);
}

Hope this saves some other developers time

Just saw this updated Google Toolbar with support for Gmail. It adds a little Gmail icon, so you can now get to your inbox with one click. It also has Gmail in the list of search targets, allowing you to search your email messages more easily.