I take it back. Sauce Reader will not replace Omea as my temporary RSS reader simply due to the fact of one glaring omission and a bug. Firstly the omission which is a missing sort function of feeds. When importing my OPML file my subscribed feeds are added in a seemingly random order. Great lets just sort them shall we? The answer is no, there is no sorting function in the program. w00t?

Secondly the bug. I like the ability to catch up with feeds by marking everything as read when I’m content that I’ve looked at what I find interesting, also a shortcut to the function is essential for speedy handling of lots of feeds. Sauce Reader does provides both the function and the shortcut but sadly the shortcut does not work.

So Sauce Reader is out and SharpReader is in. I’ve previously reverted to SharpReader when my primary reader went awry and it does the basic RSS reading very well. All I need from it to become my primary reader is a little bit of bells and whistles. Lets face it SharpReader does not sell itself all that well. For me two things are important in a program, 1) It fulfills it place in a correct and fast manner, 2) It makes me want to use it with some nice UI.

There I said it, I’m a UI whore

Looks like Sauce Reader is back as my primary RSS reader after the latest Omea Pro crash. Sauce Reader will remain in place until such a time when a stable release of Tokaj is made. The betas have been pretty solid up until this point with some random lock ups and crashes but the program always kept running. Build 600 sadly crashes right after starting making it completely useless for me. The behavior was observed on two different machines with both Pro and Reader version.

Too bad Omea was really shaping up to be a pretty decent product. It may still be but my trust in the product is weakened.

More to follow.

For a while I wanted to have the template files of DasBlog HTML highlighted but I was unable to find the answer. Today one of my colleagues showed me the answer which involves a bit of tinkering in the registry settings for Visual Studio.

1. Open HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\<version of VS, i.e. 7.1 for 2003>\Languages\File Extensions
2. Copy the GUID found in the extension.
3. Create a new key with the name of the extension you want highlighted.
4. Paste the GUID you found in step into the value named (Default) and the your custom extension into the value named unused.

Thanks to the newest additional to the Vertica crew for that little tidbit.

publicvoid has found a new home on more powerful servers and wider connections. The DNS update should be complete by now. If you are reading this post it means that your DNS server has already updated.

A big thanks to my employers at Vertica for providing me with free hosting on our Windows 2003 boxes

The hosting facility at the office is having a bit of a problem coping with the Danish summer … at temperatures of high twenties who can blame it? The service of the site may fluctuate a bit until we get hosting sorted out.

More to follow.

A pretty cool server control which makes long page loads more tolerable for users from Mark Wagner. The control looks to be very easy to use and comes with full source code for those of us who like to tinker

“I have certainly experienced times; as I am sure you have, where after clicking a submit or search button I began to wonder if the web server was going to process my request successfully.  Why shouldn’t it.  I didn’t expect it to take more than a second or two.  Performing functions like a search, report generation, or the processing of a large order, can often take more time than we would like.  These predictably slow responding places in an application are ideal candidates for user feedback in the form of a processing message.  As long as your website is not normally slow, your users will appreciate being notified of potentially long running processes.”

[Building a Better Busy Box - Ver 1.2]

Initially I was very exited about Team System with all the nice integration features, testing capabilities, and just general coolness factor. I was, however, put off by the massive price of the beast. While I certainly understood Microsoft’s reasoning behind the pricing and licensing scheme, our small shop just couldn’t justify investing such a large amount of money in the product. So I quietly made peace with the fact that we’d never get out grubby little hands on the product.

Fast forward to today where I find a post from Rick LaPlante saying that Microsoft has indeed been listening to customers and come up with a “crippled” version of Team Systems for small teams like ours. Happy! Joy!

The crippled version is kind of like what you get with an Access database where performance goes to hell with more five concurrent connections. The small version of Team System will be included with each of the Team System roles and will support up to five users. Unlike Access I seriously doubt that Team System will work with more than five concurrent users though.

In any event this is certainly good news I go to get back into the game and get beta 2 installed for some serious testing.

Also noteworthy is the fact that upgrading from a single Team System role to the full suite is getting more flexible than initially announced.

“One area where we received a lot of feedback was from smaller organizations looking to use Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server.  The ability to amortize the cost of the server over a large number of devs makes the Server exceptionally cheap on a per seat basis when you are thinking 20, 50, 100, 500 people per server.  However when you are talking about 3 people on the server, well we can all do the math.  To help address this issue, we will place a limited version of Team Foundation Server in each Visual Studio Team System role edition.  This version will be restricted to a maximum of five users and should serve the needs of smaller organizations.  Teams that have a need for more users should still find that Team Foundation Server is significantly more cost effective than current source code control solutions and offers tremendous value through its role as the core of integration across all of the Team System.”

Robert McLaws also picked up on the news.

From what I gather from the Jetbrains newsgroups Omea will have some sort of synchronisation features in future version. This is really something I’m looking forward to. Basically a combination of NewsGator 2.5 beta and Omea would make the perfect RSS aggregator as far as I’m concerned.

Omea’s interface makes the flow of information easy to handle while the new synchronisation features of NewGator makes sure that I don’t have to worry about reading the same items more than once, and I don’t have to think about synchronising my subscriptions between machines. Definitely the way to go.

Here’s the quote Dmitry Jemerov which he wrote to a question regarding adding synchronisation features to Omea:

All I can answer to this is: Stay tuned for further announcements... There is some work planned (and already happening) in that direction, but unfortunately I can't disclose the details yet.

Looking forward to more information on this.

I love it when I’m right  Build 582 of the Omea RSS reader was released yesterday.

Changes include:

- User interface design changes.
- Performance and memory usage improvements.
- Changed the way Outlook send/receive is performed, to improve robustness
and reduce flickering.
- Found words are highlighted in the context strings displayed in the search
result view.
- Added "Save As" action for news articles.
- RSS Subscribe Wizard redesigned, added possibility to subscribe to multiple
feeds from a site in one subscribe operation.
- More correct display of PDF documents when Acrobat 7 is installed.
- Added option to show the contents of subcategories when a category is selected
in the Views and Categories pane.
- Possibility to activate and deactivate tray icon rules.
- Added "Categories" button in the task edit form.
- Added possibility to configure delete confirmation for individual resource
types.
- Bugfixes and minor improvements.

I’ve recently switched to JetBrains Omea Reader and have been using the EAP version almost since day one. While the EAP is pretty stable it has a tendency to crash from time to time as can be expected from a beta product. Now JetBrains has been very good at delivering new and improved versions of the beta but lately they have been pretty quiet.

Looking in my referrer logs I see build numbers of Omea which aren’t public yet, so I can only summize that they (you know, “them”, the aliens and such) visit my site using the latest build without letting the general public in on the action.

Give me the final version yesterday I say!  In case you were wondering JetBrains seems to be up to build 580 internally with 568 being the latest public build. Also new versions are being cranked out almost on a weekly basis.

Maybe they are finalizing the release version and don’t want to spend too much time putting together stable beta? Anyways this, of course, is all speculation at this time.