yole's devblog

20021223

Some more weekend hacking done - not a full day this time, but still quite a lot. Probably I should've found something more interesting for the weekend than sitting at home in front of my computer, but it's too late to change that. :-) At least the weekend was sufficently productive, and I'm well rested from my day job. The idea of taking a couple of days of vacation during the next week doesn't look so exciting any more. :-)

OK, on to Syndirella news. The main change is one that should have been made a long time ago - now you can use Syndirella on computers that have only the .NET Framework and not Visual Studio.NET installed. Previously, Syndirella required MSHTML.dll, a primary interop assembly installed with VS.NET. This assembly is a 8 Meg file, so I was obviously quite reluctant to redistribute it. And today, thanks to an excellent FAQ entry from George Shepherd's WinForms FAQ, I've found a way to access the IHTMLDocument2 interface of the WebBrowser control without requiring any external assemblies.

Other changes:

• Possiblity to export the settings of a Web feed to an XML file and to import the settings back later.


• Syndic8.com searches are done with asynchronous XML-RPC calls, so the UI is not blocked while the search is being conducted.


• The "Add Web feed" dialog now handles HTTP errors.


• The back/forward navigation code doesn't get confused anymore by pages that contain frames or iframes.


• Changing the settings of a Web feed now invalidates the feed and causes all the entries to be downloaded anew.


• Line breaks in news item titles are now converted to spaces.


• Syndirella is now more tolerant to RSS feed encodings. If the XML encoding is not specified explicitly and an attempt to parse the feed as UTF-8 fails, the parse is retried with the ANSI codepage.


• The usual assortment of fixes and UI improvements.

The build can be found at the usual location.

Posted by yole at December 23, 2002 12:52 AM