Phil Leggetter - Software Consultant

Over the past few weeks I’ve written a little share on FriendFeed web service and accompanying piece of JavaScript that will allow publishers such as blogger or news sources to add a FriendFeed button to their website so that they can share information that they’ve found with those subscribing to their FriendFeed. The button acts in much the same was as other social bookmark widgets such as the “Digg This” button or the sharing facility offered by “Share This“.

Share on FriendFeed

As a reader there is already a way of sharing things you find of interest onto your Friendfeed. This can be done with the FriendFeed bookmarklet. However, the current option requires the user to install the bookmarklet into their browser and the publisher can’t do anything to encourage the user to share this information onto FriendFeed. The solution I have written only requires the publisher to add a few script includes to their site, a css style include and add links to prompt the user to share on FriendFeed.

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As I was cleaning up the contents of my desktop I came across a text file containing a list of links to .NET obfuscator offerings. I created this list when researching options about six months ago. The main criteria was that the obfuscator could be executed as part of an automated build process.

Here’s the contents of the list:

• http://www.remotesoft.com/salamander/obfuscator.html
• http://www.smartassembly.com/
• http://www.preemptive.com/products/dotfuscator/index.html
• http://www.9rays.net/products/Spices.Obfuscator/
• http://www.wiseowl.com/products/products.aspx
• http://www.eziriz.com/comparison.htm

I was awoken on the first day of my holiday to a clattering sound and my girlfriend exclaiming “I can’t get the top drawer open”. I turned over and looked at the clock. It read 05:50! Something within the drawer has risen high enough so that when you try to open it it catches and the drawer can’t open.

I then had to spend 30 minutes taking the whole set of drawers apart with a screwdriver to get this drawer open. I don’t know how many times I’ve come across this same problem but still the design of drawers, and more to the point their casing, stays the same. The drawer cavity always has space above the actual drawer to allow things within the drawer to move into this space and then catch when you try and open the drawer.

My point here is that this has proven time and time again to be bad design with flaws yet this design does not change. The same problem can be seen in other engineering designs including software.
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Liberator FE

I work for Caplin Systems who have recently released Liberator FE which is the Free Edition of their real time Comet server product.

Liberator is the most performant and fully-featured server currently available for streaming real-time data to web pages. The technology behind many of the world’s leading financial trading portals, it is now available FREE for evaluation and non-commercial use.

In this post I will detail my experiences when installing Liberator FE on Windows with an aim to being able to create a RIA Client that consumes data from a Capin DataSource.

Liberator Free Edition comes with a comprehensive client library for integrating with Ajax or Flex, RIAs, a Java server library for connecting to sources of data and building application logic, and full documentation.

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Taken from: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/showpost.aspx?postid=420884&siteid=1

Step 1: Dis-assemble the assembly
ildasm myTest.dll /out:myTest.il

Step 2: Re-Assemble using your strong-name key
ilasm myTest.il /res:myTest.res /dll /key:myTest.snk /out:myTestSN.dll

This code work perfectly to assign strong name.

for verification you can use following command,
sn -vf myTestSN.dll

I’ve been aware of Microsoft’s documentation generation system called Sandcastle for a while now but only recently have I had a chance to use it.

With NDoc all but dead (see NDoc 2.0 Alpha) Sandcastle is now one of very few free alternatives that I could find to generate documentation from my coding comments. However, it did take a bit of searching and playing around to get things working.

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With the reasonable success of Bring Back Beckham! I decided to push forward with my next project. The idea behind England Goals was to create a site that lists all the goals scored by the England football team and use the increase in the number of goals that can be found on external video sites to my advantage by embedding these user uploaded videos as content.

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Back in October 2006 I had an idea for a website. I tend to come up with a variety of ideas for things, most of which I add a .com to the end of. This time my idea was based around the fact that the England football team were in terrible form having drawn 0-0 with Macedonia and that Steve McClaren, the England manager, was refusing to pick England’s, and the world’s, most recognised footballer, David Beckham.

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Mapping APIs have been around for ages now and all the big guns (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) have thrown their hat into the ring.  You can even get a Google maps plugin for wordpress plugin to allow you to easily put a map in your blog.

Wow, it’s Edinburgh

There’s even an API that allows you to switch between using all three - but it doesn’t look like it’s been updated in quite a while.

All these examples exploded onto the scene but haven’t really made any major advances, that my naked eye can see, for quite a while. Why is this? Is it that they are as good as they can possibly get? Or is development stagnant for another reason? Maybe it’s lack of data! Whilst people are forever creating mashups of this on top of that with a little bit of the other thrown in the unfortunate thing for me is that there hasn’t really been anything that has blown my mind since the very early days of DHTML maps. Somebody please prove me wrong!

Maybe it’s time for the OS to start setting the data free so that people can actually benefit from the high quality data without paying through the nose - then maybe we’ll see some great UK mashups.

Once you know it you'll probably never forget it...but wait, this is the second time I've googled for this. I'd best post how you "get the Windows temporary directory using C#"!