Windows Azure Feed Reader Episode 3

~ rbonini

Sorry for the lateness of this posting. Real life keeps getting in the way.

This weeks episode is a bit of a departure from the previous two episodes. The original recording I did on Friday had absolutely no sound. So, instead of re-doing everything. I give you a deep walkthrough of the code. Be as that may, I did condense an hours worth of coding into a 20 minute segment – which is probably a good thing.

As I mentioned last week, this week we get our code to actually do stuff – like downloading, parsing and displaying a feed in the MVCFrontEnd.

We get some housekeeping done as well – I re-wrote the OPML reader using LINQ and Extension Methods. We’ll test this next week.

The final 20 minutes, or so is a fine demonstration of voodoo troubleshooting ( i.e. Hit run and see what breaks) but we get Scott Hanselmans feed parsed and displayed. The View needs a bit of touching up to display the feed better, but be as that may, it works.

Since we get a lot done this week, its rather longer – 1 hour and 9 minutes. I could probably edit out all the pregnant pauses. 🙂

Here’s the show:

Success! My 2nd HD attempt uploaded last night. Click here to see the HD on vimeo.com. Enjoy.

Remember, the code lives at http://windowsazurefeeds.codeplex.com

Managing Feeds

~ rbonini

I was just adding some new feeds to Feedly. While this is not in itself a statement of earth shattering proportions, I did something I’ve never done before: I changed the title to reflect WHY I was subscribing to that feed.

image

Frasier Spiers is doing this really cool thing with iPads at a school in Greenock, Scotland (just up the road from me, as it turns out) called the iPad Project. So i changed the title from “Frasier Spiers” to include “The IPad Project”. Now i can remember why I’ve subscribed to that feed.

Hopefully you can see where I’m driving with this. I’d love to have some formal way to remind myself what I’ve subscribed to a particular feed. Some feeds will be self explanatory, such as Scoble or Scott Hanselmann. But feeds from others less well known (or at all) such as Frasier are a tad difficult to remember.

Not sure what form this may take, but it would make life an awful lot easier.

In closing, it strikes me that twitter follows have much the same problem. But its entirely the wrong medium for requiring explanations when you follow.

Warning: Contains Programmer Humor. Handle with care.

~ rbonini ~ 1 Comment

Rob Conery has a hilarious post up entitled: Restraining Order Granted for Microsoft’s C-Sharp Compiler

A taster:

A judge from Microsoft’s .NET County submitted a 00110101 year restraining order on Friday against Microsoft’s C-Sharp development community. The stay-away order bans Microsoft developers from using the compiler’s services as a development tool, forcing them to find other means to support their claims they "they are done" with features they are developing.

Highly recommended that you read the rest of it.

Thanks for the laugh Rob.

Windows Azure Feed Reader, Episode 2

~ rbonini ~ 2 Comments

A few days late (meant to have this up on Tuesday). Sorry. But here is part 2 of my Series on building a Feed Reader for the windows Azure platform.

If you remember, last week we covered the basics and we ended  by saying that this week’s episode would be working with Windows Azure proper.

Well this week we cover the following:

  • Webroles (continued)
  • CloudQueueClient
  • CloudQueue
  • CloudBlobClient
  • CloudBlobContainer
  • CloudBlob
  • Windows Azure tables
  • LINQ (no PLINQ yet)
  • Lambdas (the very basics)
  • Extension Methods

Now, I did do some unplanned stuff this week. I abstracted away all the storage logic into its own worker class. I originally planned to have this in Fetchfeed itself. This actually makes more sense than my original plan.

I’ve added Name services classes for Containers and Queues as well, just so each class lives in its own file.

Like last weeks, this episode is warts and all. I’m slowly getting the hang of this screencasting thing, so I’ll be getting better as time goes on I’m sure. Its forcing me to think things through a little more thoroughly as well.

Enjoy:

Next week we’ll start looking at the MVC project and hopefully get it to display a few feeds for us. We might even try get the OPML reader up to scratch as well.

PS. This weeks show is higher res than the last time. let me know if its better.

Picture of the Day: Volcanic Sunsets

~ rbonini

The ash cloud (side note: the twitter hashtag was #ashtag – still makes me chuckle) a few months back did more than stop flights and ground passengers the world over. It gave photographers some brilliant sunsets.

Such was my luck that i never really managed to get out and shoot properly those few weeks.

However, I shot this out of my bedroom window, perched precariously on the window ledge.

Heres a wider angle:

From that set, I draw my current iPhone wallpaper as well:

I experimented with some manual focus and I’m sure you’ll agree, the result was excellent.

Feel free to use it too!