The Blog of Jonas Martinsson

Two of my recent articles on .NET/Java interoperability have been published by the software development press. The first article is " Deploying an ASP.NET AJAX RSS Reader on Linux ". Here, I describes the simple steps required to deploy an ASP.NET AJAX application onto an open Java platform, such as Linux. It was published in .NET Developer's Journal and can be read online . The second article is " Integrate your SharePoint environment into the open standards-based WebSphere Portal platform using the Visual Studio IDE " (try to make that longer!). It discusses .NET/Java interoperability in an enterprise environment where SharePoint and WebSphere Portal co-exist. A solution is given for integrating Microsoft SharePoint sites inside IBM WebSphere Portal. The article was translated into German for dot.net magazin's 6.2008 issue . That translation is to the best of my knowledge not available online. The original English article is available however; both in th...

Once upon a time I wrote a desktop application named ContentSpy. It let you monitor web pages for changes, and notified you as updates became available. When I recently heard of the new Google App Engine being launched, I figured I would take a stab at porting ContentSpy to that platform. I am happy to report that I stopped my endeavors, after stumbling upon ChangeDetection , which offers exactly what I envisioned, for free! Another good thing coming out of this discovery is that it won't distract my focus from working on FeedJournal ... According to Alexa , ChangeDetection has been online since 02-Nov-1999. On the other hand, their Alexa history is only available since last summer. Wayback Machine doesn't have any historical records either. Technorati 's oldest indexed post referencing ChangeDetection is from December 2007, so I assume it's a new service. Besides, I can't imagine it having escaped me for that long! Anyway, ChangeDetection is wonderful in many way...

It's great fun to monitor Technorati for blogs posts talking about FeedJournal . There are some innovative usages out there and one of my favorites is from Nik Codes , who outlines how he uses FeedJournal in the restroom ! Don't worry, the link is safe for work. " I printed out Coding Horror and it really did feel like Jeff Atwood in the Wall Street Journal or New York Times. " Nik also mentions how he uses BookletCreator for folding FeedJournal into a nice booklet, a great suggestion which I'll be sure to add to the FAQ .

Reading long articles on a computer is painful. Writing them can be even more painful. The problem is the constant interruptions and alluring distractions the computer brings. An e-mail alert here, and ad there, and then there's that cool flash game I furled this morning. My solution for uninterrupted reading is to print articles, preferably in FeedJournal format. The offline alternative to writing is of course a success-story, implemented by all authors of the past. Good old pen and paper. The problem is that sacrifices are made when writing offline: I type faster than I write; I get more pain in my hands from writing; spell and grammar check are unavailable. That's why I have been looking for a way to write uninterrupted and still use the computer. One option would be to choose a word processor's full-screen mode, to limit distractions. It has proven to be a poor option for me. Microsoft Word is not designed very well for that mode of operation and there are redundan...

Google? What's going on? I used to like you, but lately you've been disappointing me plenty. I'm not going to regurgitate that the Redmond guys beat you to the live RSS feeds for web searches . I still feel burned about the way you deleted my iGoogle start page a few months back, and didn't acknowledge the problem until much later. I still can't access my Google Calendar over HTTPS on iGoogle. Google Analytics were non-functional in iGoogle for more than a month, perhaps not surprisingly considering there is not even an official Google Analytics control! But who cares, I've moved on to another start page anyway. Greener pastures. But what's really annoys me is what's happening with Google Reader . Lately I've been suffering intolerable delays in retrieving my feeds. Pushing the Refresh button does absolutely nothing. Today, more than 18 hours after I published my last blog post on Blogger (also Google-owned) it showed up in Reader. Pffft... And addi...

On my daily commute to and from the office I enjoy listening to podcasts on my iPod. One of my favorite shows is Microsoft/Channel-9 sponsored " The Micro-ISV Show ", where Michael Lehman and Bob Walsh interview software developers who run their own businesses with small means, often on a smaller scale. The podcast is a spin-off from Bob's book "Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality", where he describes how to plan, market, host and sell your software. Amazon.com: Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality: Books: Bob Walsh ISBN : 1590596013 ISBN-13 : 9781590596012 While the book itself contains plenty of interviews with independent software vendors (ISVs), the audio interviews is a great addition and I always look forward to tuning in to new shows. The interview questions are all relevant and always shed new light on areas where software and business intersect. Some of the many notable shows have featured Eric Sink, Joel Spolsky and Nick Bradbury. My only criticism is re...

Let me be the first to admit (after my wife) that I spend too much time optimizing my to do-lists and calendar implementations - more than I actually earn from the process. Like a large number of other like-minded, I am trying to find the perfect balance between easy note-taking and a manageable and computerized system. I love the immediate availability of a pen and paper in my pocket, although I have been through a lot of other systems like a larger Filofax system (not mobile enough), Palm and PocketPC (too slow compared to handwriting) as well as the cool index-card based Hipster PDA (too difficult to sync with the PC). GTD is obviously the system of choice these days, with a splash of Covey 's Weekly Reviews and role-based goals thrown in for good measures. An eruption of online GTD implementations have become available lately but it's not until now that we are finally starting to see them mature into useful tools. My vote goes to Toodledo - it has a nice AJAXy interface w...

Summer is around the corner as well as season #49 of my favorite radio show from Swedish Radio, " Sommar ". Since 1959, each weekday during summers, Swedes are tuning in to listen to this show. Here, more and sometimes less famous people, get an opportunity to tell their story and select their choice of music between segments. The "summer speakers" picks are always a much talked about piece of news and the press conference is broadcast live. A great tradition; this cultural institution in Swedish society has succeeded in renewing itself over the years. With the Internet boom came web access and a few years ago they added archiving and a podcast format, which is of great benefit for me, living abroad. This year's invention was to invite the public to submit a beginning of a show they would host. Among the submissions, ten candidates have been selected. Now it is up to the public to cast their vote for which candidate to get their own show. I really like the forma...

It has happened a number of times that I need to subscribe to an Internet forum in my RSS reader, just to find out that the forum in question doesn't support RSS, or that its support is just not good enough. Since a lot of fora introduced image authentication for running a search I more or less by default head straight for a Google Web Search now. By using the "site:" argument it is easy to limit the search results to one specific forum. The world would be a better place for a geek like me if web search would offer an RSS feed to enable easy monitoring of new results. But, Google only offers feeds for their blog search and not their normal search. But! I just found out that rival search engine Microsoft Live Search is offering a splendid feed for all search results and I really like their polished interface as well. This is the first time I am actually impressed with Live Search. Nice work, Microsoft! I'm sure I'll be using Live Search from time to time in the fu...

Twelve percent of Internet users have downloaded a podcast, according to a Pew survey from November 2006. As more and more public media are using podcasts to make audio and video available over the Internet, the need for a decent podcast client (a.k.a. "podcatcher") increases. I have been carefully monitoring this market for at least a year - and I must admit that it has been a frustrating time. But, I think I finally found an application that has what it takes. I have been looking for a native Windows application to fit my needs, with features like: Automatic downloading of audio and video files to a specified folder. Light on system resources and not interfering with other processes. Free. Stable. Configurable. Intuitive GUI. To my great surprise there haven't been any decent choices out there for the longest time now. I have been trying all of the products out there only to uninstall them again shortly afterwards. To get a glimpse of which clients are popular, let'...

Are you being swamped with RSS content? Me too, and while waiting for mainstream feed readers to include built-in filtering support I am going to tell you how I deal with it. I am using 2 approaches for streamlining my Google Reader experience: one for removing the irrelevant posts from a feed, and another for prioritizing my subscriptions. Removing uninteresting posts When subscribing to a feed, your best option will be to find one that only contains the posts you are interested in. This blog, for example, provides individual feeds for each tag or label. If you are only interested to read new posts about .NET you should subscribe to http://jonasmartinsson.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/.NET . You are not always lucky enough to have your favorite web sites return a relevantly filtered feed for you. But don't despair, the solution is just a click away: FeedRinse provides a free RSS filtering service where you can set up rules based on titles and content. I have been using thei...

Spam and inbox overload is one of the unavoidable pains of an active online life, right? Well, not necessarily so. There are a few proven techniques for how to get rid of unwanted e-mail from your inbox. One of them is to be very restrictive about giving out your personal e-mail address, another involves investing in advanced anti-spam filters. But how do you go about signing up for newsletters and other information from sites that you are not trusting? I am happy with my current setup for solving these problems and thought that I would share it with you. The service I am using is free and called MailBucket. It is simply an email address with the suffix "@mailbucket.or g" that is free for you to claim. Let's say you want to use the e-mail address joe@mailbucket. org - you simply type this address in the e-mail field when subscribing to for example a newsle...

I am a competitive guy. People who know me well, know that I always go to the bottom of things; have a passing interest in anything will never happen to me. It's either all or nothing. For years, I have been looking for ways to funnel my energies into some kind of online community. Requirements are that it should be engaging, competitive and educational. I have been taking quite a few stabs at different online gaming communities but they haven't turned out to be what I am looking for. I am happy to say that finally, I think I have found the niche I have been hunting. TopCoder.com . TopCoder is an online community for people who love programming. Or rather, it was; today it has grown to cater for architects, testers and graphics artists as well. The basic concept is that you participate in contests where you need to solve three algorithm problems in a language of you...

When writing drafts for this blog, I have been struggling with how to type up the articles. Sometimes I am working on different computers and I need an easy way of moving the documents between locations. So far I have been using a USB drive where I store the documents. This has the drawback of needing the same application installed on all computers. Another option is setting up an automatic synchronization between shared computers but it doesn't work for me because some of them are blocked behind a firewall. Enter the new paradigm of online word processors! The idea is that your documents are edited using your web browser and the files are hosted on the service's website. You can choose to share or protect each document, and despite being a new phenomenon there are already a few interesting players on the market. All of these online services automatically integrate many a...

Some of my fellow finalists have blogged about their intended usage of nDoc as a documentation tool for their source code. nDoc is hugely popular for automatic documentation of .NET code, using Visual Studio's support for XML comments in the source code. A week ago, nDoc went into a coma, when its single maintainer, Kevin Downs, announced his resignation from the open-source project. The problem, which in many cases are symptomatic of open-source projects, is that a majority of these projects are driven by one or a few enthusiast individuals, and their lifespan is directly related to how long it lasts until these individuals lose interest. It is rare to see a dying project being rescued by another developer, who keeps it running. Problems selling the software is the usual reason for the death of a commercial application. This sort of death is less painful for the software market, si...

Reading my fellow finalist Douglas Steen's entry about bug tracking tools, I am totally agreeing with him that it would be great to have a lightweight bug-tracking tool built into Express. Sure enough, we have the Task List pane where tasks can be sorted and having a priority but that's not really accomplishing anything substantial. Douglas chose a web-based bug tracking system and he mentioned another web-based system. Hunting the Internet will lead you to yet other web-based systems. Why does 99% of bug-tracking systems have to be run in the browser? I hate the browser: it is less responsive than a native Windows application as well as usually lacking a menu and having quirky keyboard support. Just because a system is multiuser doesn't mean that the browser is the only interface. The large advantage I see of using the browser is that no client softwa...

I have started the implementation of my project in C# Express Edition, and one of the first things I have stumbled upon is the frustration of having to deal with many different XML feed standards. There are RSS and Atom, each of them with several different sub-versions. But that's not all. We also have a slew of Internet cowboy hackers who don't have any desire at all to follow these standards. In short, RSS/Atom land is a jungle. Time to take out the machete! When researching the options of a suitable machete for the feed jungle, the following 3 caught my attention: Atom.NET + RSS.NET IP*Works Microsoft's RSS library , included in IE7 Rolling my own component based on .NET's XML support Atom.NET + RSS.NET These are two separate open-source libraries, implemented in C# .NET, which enables user...

Using the Visual Studio Express editions to build a software product is a delight. I have been using Visual Studio for years, and can testify to the great quality of Microsoft's development tools. When asked about my favorite application all categories, I always answer VS. With the latest Express editions, Microsoft have outdone themselves again. Beside making the IDE available for free, there are many important new features in this package. My hands-down favorite feature must be the built-in refactoring support. I have been a huge fan of Martin Fowler's landbreaking book "Refactoring" , since its publication in 1999. Since I have been mainly developing in C/C++ during my development career, I have not had the privilege of using any refactoring tool professionally. (refactoring is dependent on reflection support, which is difficult to achieve, if not impossible,...

One of the most useful Firefox extensions I have installed must be ViewMyCurrency , which helps me to convert currencies inside the browser. Basically you define which currency you want all prices to be converted into and then many major world currencies will automatically be converted and displayed along with your own currency inside any web page. If you regularly browse sites with prices not in your preferred currency you will greatly benefit from this extension. I have been using it for several months now both at work and and at home, and I can't imagine surfing without it. Highly recommended, and of course free!

For a long time I have been trying to get up early and spend less time in bed. Now I know how to do this! Check out Steve Pavlina's great article "How to Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Goes Off"