Tonight I had to make the hard decision to shut my free online family album service down.  I decided that since it has had very little usage over the last few months, that I'm wasting money on hosting fees.  For those who have never been to http://www.webfa.com, this site - dubbed WebFA - was my senior multi-media project I created in Oct-Dec. of 2002.  It was a GREAT learning tool, as .NET 1.0 was in its infancy stages, and a GREAT way to show off my skills to my professor.  The site was fun, to both use and build...however pulling the plug was the right thing. 

If you would like a copy of the source code...well, too bad.  After several server, and workstation rebuilds, I lost all code to the site...thus making any updates impossible.  I do, however, have the SQL code (well its still on the database) as well as HTML markup...but without the good 'ol VB.NET code behinds, the sites useless.  If you would like a working copy, I can give you what I have...however, I suggest going to something like nGallery, as it has code.

So long, fair well...(song fading as you see the website fading into the horizon).

Well, after my rant on how OE doesn't support the full RFC850 spec, I did some more testing, debugging, whatever you want to call it, and determined that there was a hidden new line character appended to the end of the Message-ID which was causing the headaches. So, I guess OE was doing things right, it was just that darn extra character throwing things off. So, now would be the time to grab my foot and stick it firmly within my mouth!

During my development of the NNTP plugin for NewsGator, I've come across a problem when viewing replied messages in Outlook Express. Per the RFC850 spec., if replying to a message in a newsgroup, you should add a new header named "References" that points to the Message-ID of the message being replied to. This header is then used to group messages within groups so its easier to keep track of threads.

This is all fine and dandy, except for the fact that Outlook Express doesn't recognize the References header, or even want to use it. I realize that this header is optional, but for OE to ignore it completely and chunk the rest of the headers into the body of the message when displaying, is just crazy. Due to my assumptions that OE wasn't implementing the spec entirely, I decided to play around with it some more....and it turns out that when OE replies to messages, it never appends the "References" header. Furthermore, it seems that OE groups messages based on subject only. I've found this to be the case, as I've posted several new messages with the same header, and whatta ya know, they get grouped together.

So, just to make sure that I wasn't crazy, I set out to find a few USENET readers. Well, all that I tested implemented the sepc properly, and grouped them based on the "References" header, and not on the subject. To me, this is a bug or an oversight by the team building Outlook Express...and I wouldn't mind if it got fixed (as well as many other people out there).

Why is it a scary day? Well, I just got an email with an attachment. So? Whats your point...well a few things:

1. The email was from someone I didn't know, no biggie I get these all the time for support.
2. No subject. Well, this isn't always a problem, since I know some users just don't know that the cursor starts at the subject line 99% of the time.
3. The email said "test". Huh, now thats a bugger, I guess it worked?
4. There was an attached file, a zipped one - wow someone sent me pictures?

Well, if you haven't figured it out yet, I've finally seen something I've been dreading for the longest time, a zipped-up virus attached to an email. Why is this so important, though...it can pass through almost all server based virus scanners scanning emails as they come across. So, as I quickly alerted my employer (which then sent out a company wide email stating roughly the same thing), I wanted to alert the community as well. Be alarmed if you receive an email from someone you don't know that has a zipped attachment...especially if the attachment contains a .pif file.

UPDATE: CNet is reporting this virus now, be warned! (story)

Yup, thats right...its finally over. As the story describes, Mike Rowe settled for a certification course, subscription to MSDN, free trip to Developer Network Research Tech Fest, and an Xbox all for the domain name transfer to MS. MS was also kind enough to pay any expesnes incurred during this ordeal as well as helping him setup his new website - http://www.MikeRoweForums.com. Good to see that Mke won this battle, Rock on!

This is by far the funniest SNL skit I've seen. Turn your sound up and get read to laugh!

Something has been bugging me about .Text the last few months.  I finally felt it was time to express my thoughts, or rather a request for v.96.  What if we were able to track which blogs we made a comment on, or enable the same comment notification that a blog owner receives?  I don't know how many countless times I've had to actually try and remember whose blog I posted the comment to, and then, which entry.  It could be easily done (now when I say easy, I mean from an end users viewpoint) to have this, maybe an extra checkbox on the comments to say "Notify me when someone posts a comment".  It would work the same way as the ASP.NET forums.  How 'bout it?

Update: CommentRSS is currently enabled and available within .Text, however NewsGator currently does not support it.

It seems that Microsoft has decided the whole "MikeRoweSoft.com" incident that was publicised yesterday was bad publicity for them. (story)  It sounds like Microsoft will be settling the dispute so it will be fair to both parties.

The day has come where I've been waiting for about a month...the release of NewsGator 2.0. As most of you know, this is a MS Outlook plugin that integrates seamlessly with Outlook...and I can say that v2.0 is even better than 1.3. The new "NewsPage" is a lot better and more streamlined...makes reading my feeds a ton easier.

I haven't checked out a new feature, Online Services, but they've got a 14 day trial, so I make take the plunge and see if its worth the $5 or $6 a month. Here is the changelog from 1.3 and screenshots from 2.0.

I've successfully built my 2 installers (one for 1.0 and 1.1 frameworks), and let me tell ya, NSIS is a pretty good install script creator. With NSIS, I was finally able to do what I wanted to do:

1. Give the user the option to not install to the GAC
2. Give the user the ability to choose what optional components they want installed.

All of this done without the headache of creating custom actions & trying to figure out how things work in the limited MSI Setup Packager within VS.NET. I definately suggest this free script creator as it is very, very nice, to all developers out there struggling with VS.NET's MSI Setup Installer.

The only problem I came across, was how to install stuff to the GAC, but Martin Webrant gave me a good pointer. I also built in support for detecting the .NET framework & its versions. If you're using NSIS, or want to get started and need some pointers for installing .NET assemblies, I'd love to give ya some help and give you some of my functions.