Ron from patterns & practices is not only blogging and webcasting but also podcasting. He’s got two podcasts up so far. The first is a discussion with Billy Hollis about smart client architectures. It’s pretty short – just enough to whet your appetite. (Quick plug – Billy is presenting with Rocky on Smart Client Architecture as part of the TechEd 2005 ARC track.) Ron’s second podcast is with Scott Densmore on EntLib’s ConfigurationContext. It’s cool stuff, but it’s alot harder to follow (for me anyway) topics related to code like this with just audio. Luckily, Scott blogged about this as well.

The other day, I wished my Zen Micro supported variable speed playback for podcast playback. I’ve got another feature request, this time for podcast recording. The Zen Micro features include built in microphone and support for voice recording. But there doesn’t appear to be any way to hook up an external microphone. The built-in mic is fine for leaving messages for yourself, but it’s not high enough quality for podcasting “on the go”. Additionally, since I’m using WMP 10 instead of the app that comes with the Zen Micro, I’m not sure there’s any way to sync the recorded files back down to my PC, but I’m thinking that’s just a matter of geting Notmad Explorer talking to my Zen Micro.

Update: Sometime shortly after I blogged this, Adam curry posted an episode of DSC recorded on a Zen Micro that Sean gave him. I haven’t had a chance to listen yet, but I’m interested in how it sounds and how well it worked for Adam. Do you have to hold it near your mouth the whole time? I still wish I could use an external mic.

When I upgraded to DasBlog 1.7.2, I had to create an empty rss.aspx file on disk to fool the Title Mapper (that’s the part the handles the new title based URLs) into not looking for a post with the title “rss”. I knew that a large number of people read my post via the RSS feed, so I didn’t want to break what has been the feed address since DevHawk started. However, I didn’t think the atom feed would matter as much, so I didn’t bother to do the workaround for atom.aspx. Turns out I was wrong. Atom.aspx was requested nearly once a minute between 11pm and 12am yesterday. I got tired of counting, but I’m guessing that number is even higher during the middle of the day since just over half of my traffic comes from the US + Canada. So I created an empty atom.aspx page to fool the Title Mapper even further.

Now, will I have to do the same for my CDF feed?

Larry O’Brien clued me into the fact that the new DevHawk theme didn’t render correctly in FireFox. When I redid my theme, I tried to be good and use all div and span tags, but apparently building a three column layout with a dynamically sized middle column that works on IE and FireFox is beyond my CSS skills. So I went back to using tables. Maybe the folks at CSS Zen Garden would freak out, but the table works just fine.

Larry also pointed me to ActiveSWF, a server side COM component for generating dynamic flash movies. You munge up an XML file describing the movie, hand it to ActiveSWF and it does the rest. Sweet. Only thing missing is a .NET version (I realize I can interop to COM, but that’s a pain to deploy).

Thanks Larry!

I just finished upgrading my blog to the new 1.7.2 RC build. I’m excited about some of the new features, such as the major caching improvements, CAPTCHA for avoiding comment spam, and the new permalinks. The permalinks one is pretty silly, esp. because I pushed for a version that used pluses for spaces. So the permalink for this post will be New+DasBlog+Version.aspx instead of NewDasBlogVersion.aspx. But it’s a style thing (I am in marketing now, right?). Speaking of style, I also upgraded the site template and pared down my navigation links. I moved the blogs on that list to a new “friends and family” blogroll. I did add a link to the new Archives page, which lists all the posts I’ve ever made, by category. And I added flair links to add this blog to your desktop newsreader of choice (that supports feed://) as well as to My MSN and NewsGator.

There’s still room for improvement. DasBlog still need story support, IMO. Also, I’d like to have a good offline posting experience. None of the existing blog authoring tools work for me since I use crossposts for my MSDN blog (which is what gets pulled into Architecture Center). I end up writing my posts in FrontPage and then cutting and pasting into the dasBlog web interface. Yuck.

One quick note – because of the new permalink title support, a set of existing URL mappings on my site started causing internal exceptions. This is because any URL ending in aspx that isn’t a file on disk is assumed to be a permalink. Of course, all my existing mappings aren’t files on disk nor are they permalinks to blog entries. I changed these mappings from *.aspx to *.ashx to avoid these exceptions and my template and navigation links to match. The only .aspx mapping I left intact was rss.aspx, since pretty much all of my subscribers use that as my rss feed. When I upgraded from my original blog engine, I had to add the rss.aspx mapping to avoid breaking any existing subscribers. Of course, I certainly don’t want to break those subscribers now. As a quick and very dirty workaround, I created an empty rss.aspx file in my web app directory. Now, the title mapper doesn’t attempt to map to a permalink since there’s an existing file on disk. Oh well, that’s why this is a release candidate version.