Hello.

If you are somehow living under a rock you may not have noticed that Beta 2 for Visual Studio 2005 is available to download for MSDN Universal subscribers. I have been following the development not too closely, but enough to be excited by this news! Product Page Uninstall Previous Versions (Must be followed) I hope to have some examples of stuff soon :)

Because I have been playing with Amazons web service, I was wondering if anyone else knew of any other good web services out there.Specifically I am looking for UK based retail Web services like Amazon, a Tesco, Asda or Virgin etc one would be great. But any will do, I am finding it hard to find any decent easy to read resources on the Internet :) And that UDDI stuff, sheeeesh!

One thing I have been looking at recently is how to access the Users Internet Explorer Favorites.I managed to find two resources somewhere, one was c# to find the favorites and the other was VB.Net code which parse the *.Url file.I have the code below (tv is a Tree view on a form): …DirectoryInfo di = new DirectoryInfo( System.Environment.GetFolderPath( Environment.SpecialFolder.Favorites ));EnumerateFavorites(di);… The above code will get the directory information about a users Favorites.

I just realised that I never followed my own advice to watch the videos on MSDN. I just watched Designing .NET Class Libraries: Member Types and I have to admit, this guy talks sense :) Even though I have done a lot of c#, it is very interesting what “the” people talk about and their basic standards. I liked his arguments for cohesion of overloaded methods. I think I will try and follow that advice.

I have been playing with Amazons SOAP API as well as Yahoo’s REST API. I really like both of these API’s. I will talk about some ideas I have for letting both of these API’s interact in a later blog. :) I was looking into using REST in .Net 1.1, it was a bit of hack but it is based off Martin G. Brown work. The basic steps are to download an XSD for the response package.

I have just been reading a bit about Binary XML. Am I missing something? There are lots of arguments against XML which I will try and summarise: Text Processing is Slow; The Verbosity can cause storage problems; You can’t store binary data, Basically, most of the arguments against using XML for data storage and transmission revolve around the time it takes to process the text, storing strings of data rather than there binary representation (such as “12” instead of 00001100 [binary byte]).

This has just appeared and is being spread across several peoples’ blogs. I can’t wait for this series to kick off (for the public) it looks like it is going to be good. At the moment they only have up an introduction which includes some good little pointers to why API design and forethought is good. From what I have read, it was a course for internal MS people but they are releasing some of the stuff (that they are allowed to) for us to listen to.

Hi Guys, This is just a test to see how things go, hopefully soon I can start posting stuff about stuff. Hopefully I can post things I learn about c#, c# 2.0 and the .net framework. Cheers Ears :)