IE7 and Offline favorites

I've been using IE 7 for a little while now and I am quite impressed with it. The bit I am disappointed with is offline support, a feature that has been dropped or rather superseded by its Rss support.

Now I wouldn't be upset with this if it wasn't for my new TabletPC...with IE 6 installed on it I can quite happily save pages offline for reading on the train home and this is great. I'd love to do this with IE 7 and use the cool tabs feature but you can't do it and it's a real shame as I do like what they have done with it - I just wish they hadn't dropped this feature as it's the main one I use!

I've just got a Fujitsu Lifebook P1510 and I'm really impressed with it. I particularly like the handwriting recognition. It's very accurate without any training but on my bumpy train ride home it takes twice as long to actually write anything but it looks pretty damn cool!

Already though I'm worried that as a niche (ultra portable) laptop I am going to have trouble with batteries in the future. Past experience has shown that a laptop battery can rapidly deteriorate and give a very short operational time. Conversations with colleagues have highlighted that it can be difficult or impossible to get a replacement battery after only a year or so as the models are superseded. Should I get another battery now while I can? A comment made was that batteries do not store well and deteriorate even when not in use...is this so? :-S

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Configuration in .Net 2.0

11-Dec-2007 Update I've updated this post to fix the broken images and replaced them with inline text for the example xml and accompanying C# code. This post has been by far the most hit on this blog and along with the comments about the missing images I thought it was time to update it! Whilst recreating the examples below I zipped up the working source code and xml file and loaded this onto my Project Distributor site - please download it to get a full working custom configuration to play with! Just click on the CustomConfigExampleSource link on the right hand side, then the "Source" link to get the zip. We are in the process of converting our codebase to .Net 2.0. We've used Enterprise Library to great effect so decided that we should continue with this in the form of the Jan 2006 release which targets 2.0 and I've got the job of porting our Logging, Data Access etc wrappers to EntLib 2.0. ...And so far so good - the EntLib docs aren't bad and the migrati...

Walk-Thru: Using Wolfpack to automatically deploy and smoke test your system

First, some history... The advent of NuGet has revolutionised many many aspects of the .Net ecosystem; MyGet, Chocolatey & OctopusDeploy to name a few solutions building upon its success bring even more features to the table. I also spotted that NuGet could solve a problem I was having with my OSS System Monitoring software Wolfpack ; essentially this is a core application framework that uses plugins for extension ( Wolfpack Contrib ) but how to unify, standardise and streamline how these plugins are made available? NuGet to the rescue again - I wrapped the NuGet infrastructure (I deem NuGet to be so ubiquitous and stable that is has transcended into the software "infrastrucuture" hall of fame) with a new OSS project called Sidewinder . Sidewinder allows me to wrap all my little extension and plugins in NuGet packages and deploy them directly from the Wolfpack application - it even allows me to issue a new version of Wolfpack and have Wolfpack update itself, sweet huh...

Announcing FluentGeoApi - a C# wrapper to GeoAPI.com

I'm pleased to make public the fruits of my late nights.... FluentGeoApi ! I previously mentioned that I am working on a private/personal project - well it's got an element of geolocation to it and after a bit of internet research I found GeoAPI.com . In order to interact with GeoAPI I decided to write a fluent style wrapper over the top of it and I've just released v1.0.0.0, a .Net 3.5 C# library to take the pain out of making REST calls and dealing with the GeoJson wire format used by GeoAPI. It's not 100% coverage of the API but I plan on getting there ASAP...however I've implemented Create/Modify/Delete a user entity, Simple and Keyword Search which is enough to release it. If you are working with geolocation data/features in your .Net application I would check out GeoAPI.com - I've been really impressed with what if offers (and if you hit the api < 20,000 times a day it won't cost you a penny!) - hopefully you'll also consider using FluentGe...

James Simmonds

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