Wictor Wilen

Scott Watermasysk led med to this article by Nick Wilson on why you should not have Snap Preview Anywhere on your blog and I’m now joining the bloggers who remove the preview features. I agree with Nick on that the preview is pretty annoying and that it’s not problem free (more than often you have to click more than once on a link). Byt why did I put it up in the first place? This blog is not just a blog for me I use it as a testing platform for different kind of techniques, hypes etc - and to have fun. I will still try on new interesting stuff and I may also remove old uninteresting stuff.

The day is finally here and Windows Vista is available for the consumer market and the commercials are everywhere. In Sweden we hade the annual Grammis awards, the Swedish music industry price, this evening and it was broadcasted on TV. The awards was sponsored by Microsoft and of course it had the standard sponsored by stuff in every commercial break (I’m glad I watched it on Vista Media Center with 30 minutes delay so I could skip those :-). The Vista marketing team had also managed to sneak in some really cool Vista branding when the nominees for each category was presented.

As you probably already have read by now is that the XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 are now W3C Recommendations. XSLT 2.0 is a really nice step forward in the XML transformation technology, a technique that we base our software on to enable us to produce content for different devices, platforms and targets. XPath 2.0 and XSLT 2.0, in specific, could help us making these transformations much easier without having to use XSLT Extension Objects for some tasks. 

msfeedicon 2.2 is now available for download! msfeedicon is an Internet Explorer 7 add-on which displays an icon in the system tray with information on your feed subscriptions and notifies you with a notification window when a feed is updated. Version 2.2 contains some interesting new features such as the possibility to use Tags to find the posts that you are interested. It’s especially interesting if you subscribes on a lot of feeds. You can use the Tags so that updated feeds containing your Tags wil be Auto-starred or that notifications should only be displayd for the tagged feeds.

msfeedicon, the Internet Explorer 7 feeds utility, is now at version 2.1, a new release with interesting new features. It was just a few days ago that version 2.0 was released, but I have recieved interesting feedback and I had some good ideas on how to develop it further that I just had to implement. I already have plans for another two or three releases in the near future, contact me if you are interested, so you will most probably see more upgrades soon…

It seems like I was not the only one who thought that there should be some nice system tray application for the feeds in Internet Explorer 7. I created the msfeedicon application which shows unread feed posts and notifies the user of new and unread posts. The application have had a few hundred downloads so far and I have had positive feedback from users. Now the Microsoft RSS Team have released the (unsupported) Feeds Plus plugin to Internet Explorer 7 which basically do the same thing with some differences, read more about them on the RSS Team blog.

msfeedicon is now released at version 2.0 and is a major update to the previous versions. msfeedicon is a plugin to the Windows RSS platform and Internet Explorer 7 Feeds and appears as an icon in the Windows XP/Vista system tray and displays when you have unread posts in your subscribed feeds. Whenever there is new posts in a feed msfeedicon will show an alert window with direct access to unread posts. No more need to have the Feeds Favorites Center visible in Internet Explorer nor Internet Explorer open to see when your feeds are updated.

Finally ASP.NET AJAX 1.0, known as Atlas, is released in a fully supported version. The Download is available at http://ajax.asp.net. Here’s a summary from Scott’s blog: The ASP.NET AJAX 1.0, which is available for free with full Microsoft support, can be extended with the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit - a set of more than 30 controls for ASP.NET. Microsoft also releases the client-side ASP.NET AJAX JavaScript library under the Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL) which allows you to modify the library and the server-side code is released under Microsoft Reference License (Ms-RL) so your debugging will be easier.

For all you Total Commander fans out there; Christian Ghisler has released a new public beta for Total Commander 7.0. Some of the highlights: When pressing F7 to create a directory and the cursor is placed on a file then Total Commander suggests the filename (minus the extension) as the name for the directory Icons in the menus Even more customization options than before