The Blog of Jonas Martinsson

Shortly after I published my previous blog post regarding the Made In Express Contest controversy, Microsoft contacted me. They said that they had conducted a review of the final results and had decided to award the amount of the Grand Prize to both of the First Place winners! So what swayed Microsoft into changing their attitude? I am not saying that my blog post did it, but I like to think that it played a part in their decision. Another huge contributor to this decision was Channel9 user Minh (thank you!), who called up Mark Jewett at Microsoft to get some answers. The phone conversation was recorded and you can download the mp3 from here . Way to go, Mark Jewett and Microsoft! I know that you took a a lot of abuse in the C9 forums but the way that you resolved the situation impresses me. Thank you!

C9 posters demand that the winning team in Made In Express Contest will be disqualified from the competition and their $10,000 prize revoked. They point at evidence that the winner, professor Ernie Hall, did not abide by the rules by using already developed code and working in a team. I have been lurking in the C9 forums for the last few days, following the heated debate. Three forum threads [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] totaling over 200 posts to date, cover it all. The posters include Mark Jewett, the MS guy behind the contest, as well as two out of the three judges, Chris Pirillo and Robert Scoble. I assume the rest of the finalists have been following the C9 discussion as well, but so far all of them have kept mum. As the runner-ups, I and Ali Khalid, are identified as the big losers in all of this (a mere $9,000), I decided to make my opinion heard. First...

Yesterday, Microsoft announced that my newspaper project FeedJournal had been awarded First Place in their Made In Express Contest. As regular readers of my blog know, my brainchild FeedJournal is the .NET application I am writing to revolutionize the way you read newspapers. The judges (Chris Pirillo, LockerGnome; Phillip Torrone, MAKE Magazine; Robert Scoble, Scobleizer) motivation read: Jonas helped us all take a step closer to publishing our own newspaper based on the news we care about. FeedJournal is actually a little glimpse of the future…it will likely be a common way for readers to ‘roll their own’ magazines in the near future. This is probably my finest moment ever in my long software development career and I want to thank Microsoft for arranging the contest and everyone who has supported the project by dropping emails or blog comments. And I want to send...

Last chance to vote for FeedJournal in Made In Express Contest ! Anyone is free to vote and the booths will close on September 1st! Thank you for your support.

Chris Pirillo has something to say about the Made In Express Contest . Considering he is one of the judges in the contest, I am definitely listening. This is his verdict about my own entry, FeedJournal: Still has a long way to go, but I'd say that sample output is quite nifty. The only thing that keeps me from installing and recommending the app wholeheartedly is the need to install SQL Server 2005 Express Edition first - which I'm not going to do on my desktop. Suggestion: push forward with this one, but rely on something else for feed information storage (sorry, but installing SQL is overkill for users like myself). Considering his overall harsh judgment of the projects I consider this pretty favorable, and indeed he goes on to mention FeedJourn...

In Made In Express Contest it is now up to the public to vote for the project they like best. FeedJournal is one out of the 11 projects you can vote for. Please make a visit and choose your favorite! This also implies that you can finally download FeedJournal v1.0 from the the Made In Express link above. Despite the name it is a beta test version, while I am continuing to work on v2.0. Visit feedjournal.com for more information.

The time has come to let go of FeedJournal v1.0. I have been working on it for months and thinking about it for even longer. Without the definite contest deadline hanging over me, I think it would have been difficult for me to resist adding more features before publicizing it. But, in the end it's for the better. FeedJournal needs to get out there and get some real-world testing before it can mature into higher versions with a larger feature set. I definitely don't see this contest submission as the end of the line for FeedJournal, more like a baby's first steps. I choose to look at this version as a public beta test. Although v1.0 has been thoroughly tested I have decided to let it expire on October 1st, forcing users to upgrade to a higher version. Much like a beta or release candidate would work. The time has also come for me to sum up the experien...

The Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Everywhere Edition requires Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista. If Windows 2000 is unsupported I will have to look at other solutions instead for the future. I tried to convert my database from Express's MDF format into Everywhere's SDF format, but ran into problems. With the short time remaining to the version 1.0 deadline (contest submission) the database optimization is something that will have to wait. Now is not the time to introduce more risk in the project. I also decided to go with the ClickOnce system of deploying the application, which is helping out. It comes especially in handy with the installation of the runtime environments for .NET 2.0 and SQL Server Express. ClickOnce automatically figures out if the user needs to get these installed without me having to write a single line of code/script, wh...

As I previously blogged about I was using Shalom Help Maker to generate my help file. After spending some time with this and finally completing the user documentation, I was ready to insert it into FeedJournal. The it suddenly hit me: this is not the right help format! The Danish Shalom Help Maker is generating help files in the old Windows .HLP format, which has been obsolete for some years now. What I need is CHM format, which I had up till now deluded myself into believing I was working with. Ouch! OK, there must be some way of converting my HLP file into CHM, right? Nope, at least nothing free, and all of the programs I tried generated an error during the conversion. Finally, after much hunting I found a link to a freeware application on the excellent forums at Joel on Software . The program was called HelpMaker , and sure enough its conversion feature also choked on...

Two days left for FeedJournal 's contest submission and I am trying to prioritize which items have higher priority than others to complete. Right now I am working on the text of the CHM help file and I hope to finish it soon. After that (if there will be enough time) I want to see if I can easily switch to SQL Server Everywhere Edition , which should boost performance on low-end PCs quite a bit. Before submission I also want to make sure that the install scripts are completed. I haven't decided between ClickOnce and InnoSetup yet. I have previous positive experiences with InnoSetup, but Microsoft's ClickOnce also seems nice in that it can support transparent upgrades and it integrates the .NET 2.0 framework installation automatically. I will also need to write an build instructions document, which should be straightforward in my case. ...

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...

The online poker rooms are flourishing in what seems to be the Eldorado of our time. But not for long. Around the corner lurk the bots, or computer programs designed for playing poker, currently in hard training to win your hard-earned cash . Ten years ago I was an avid poker player, constantly on the lookout for new games. Most of my friends that I used to play for nickels and dimes are still playing today. They have taken their chip stacks online, and the limits have increased, but from the look of it they are doing well financially. Online poker ten years back consisted of a yearly e-mail tournament and games played over Internet Relay Chat (IRC), including first-generatio n bots. Online discussions took place on a spam-filled USENET newsgroup; in short, the situation wasn't very exciting. Today, you can hardly enter any web site without seeing advertising for online poker, with poker sites...

Time, quality, resources and scope. Those are the four variables in software project management. As the deadline closes in I only have the luxury to change scope. Sure, there are more features I planned to get into this version, but the scope will be cut in order to make the release stable and have a timely delivery. Time is a rare resource for me these days with being a new father , having a full-time job, following the latest news about the regional conflict, and blogging/develo ping FeedJournal . Despite that, I am proud of what I have accomplished so far with my project in Visual C# 2005 Express Edition. One week remains until release, and the time has come for Code Freeze: no more new features. Until August 6th I will work on finalizing documentation, web site, and of course testing. FeedJournal will become a commercial project in version 2.0. Until then the ...

Yes folks, we have a world premiere, the first sample of a FeedJournal issue is available for your viewing pleasure! Let me remind you that the purpose of the FeedJournal project is to generate a PDF newspaper based on RSS feeds, intended for printing. The PDF file is available for download here . In order to open it you will need Adobe Reader or Foxit Reader . The content spans a selection of last week’s blog entries from the Made In Express Contest finalists. I chose these feeds, not because I want to plug the contest, but because I want to avoid breeching copyright law for republishing other blogs’ articles. So what can you see in this sample issue? The following settings are in use: A4 paper size (a European standard), 4 columns, 0 points line spacing, 8 points column spacing, 30 points page margin and 10 points margin between headline and article text. Furth...

In an instant the situation here has deteriorated. Rockets explode closer and closer to our home (so far a safe distance away), and it will surely take time before we will see and end to it all. Native Israelis are more relaxed about the situation, more adapted, or perhaps it's just an image they are putting up. Having recently become a father makes me worry about my family's security. Between closely monitoring the latest headlines, spending time with our 1.5 month old daughter Noa and working my butt off at my day-job, the contest deadline is slowly closing in. I started to write the FeedJournal help file but I haven't decided on a format yet. HTML is attractive because I can easily host an online version of the help files, while keeping them up to date with minimal maintenance. CHM files are more standard and look more professional though. The jury is still out......

Microsoft recently announced a new edition in their SQL Server 2005 family of products: Everywhere Edition . This is a free and lightweight version of SQL Server 2005. So what is different from the Express Editions that is required for us Made In Express Finalists? I can only talk for myself but the Everywhere Edition would be more suitable than the Express Edition for my Windows Forms application for a number of reasons (source: Steel Price's blog ): runtime size is only 1.4MB (in-process), single data file without transition log, smaller redistributable package, embeddable in applications. In short, Everywhere Edition is more system resource friendly! Of course, there are some limitations in Everywhere, compared with Express, for example it cannot run as a service and lacks multiuser support. These issues are not r...

A few days ago Microsoft officially launched their open-source project hosting web site CodePlex . It is great to see Microsoft finally embracing and supporting the open-source community with an initiative like this. Like all web launches these days CodePlex is a work in progress, and even though the functionality is still a little thin, I see great projects coming out of it very soon. What makes CodePlex stand out compared to the established player, Sourceforge , is the user interface and user friendliness. Sure, it is limited to .NET projects but isn't that what we all are passionate about? FeedJournal will not be hosted on CodePlex, but I will definitely consider submitting other projects of mine there, or joining something interesting. The reason I will keep FeedJournal off CodePlex is that I plan to take FeedJournal commercial after the publication of the free 1.0 versi...

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...

When I first started spawning ideas about an RSS reader that would print the articles as a regular newspaper, I had a tough choice to make between output formats . My main options were: HTML with CSS Microsoft Word Adobe's PDF format There are also other document formats (RTF, etc) I considered but quickly rejected. Let's look at each of these formats in order to see how I came to my final decision. The main factor guiding my choice was having the result look professional, with justified multicolumn paragraphs for instance. The thing is that I would love to be creating an HTML page with CSS styling because of the portability. Basically the full published issue would be contained in one HTML page (with a few hyperlinked image files). This package would open on any computer with a decent web browser. Also, page br...

As I have mentioned on the blog before, the big project I am working on right now is a feed aggregator in the form of a paper newspaper. This application is currently being developed using the .NET 2.0 framework. By using this development environment I automatically qualified to enter Microsoft's $10,000 Made In Express Contest where the idea was picked along with 11 other finalists. I have previously used the name "RSS Star" for the project, but from now on the name will be FeedJournal. Information about this project is available at www.feedjournal .com - and as part of Microsoft's contest I will also be blogging at http://spaces.m sn.com/madeinex press6