For about two months I have been really looking forward to the 4.9
version of iTunes – I expected seamless podcast support and most
importantly auto conversion to bookmarkable aac files. When you listen
to number of podcasts I do you want a good podcast receiver. So what
did I find:

• Intergration with iTunes is OK – a true GUI directory is sweet
  although it is more basic than corporate GUIs I churned out in 1994 on
  16 bit 386 machines
• No bittorrent support – this means podcast providers hosting bills will skyrocket if many users move away from iPodder
• We cannot paste custom urls when a podcast is not in Apple’s directory, like My’lanta for instance
• There is no Auto conversion to bookmarked files (aac) -aargh, bookmarks are why I bought an iPod in the first place
• No playlist per podcast – all podcasts are dumped into the same
  playlist. Do Apple not realize many people use their iPods solely for
  podcasts and don’t want to be scrolling through 100+ files at 90mph on
  the highway while simultaneously riding the bumper of a 911
  and flipping off the SUV that they just cut up?

Ok enough of a rant already. I tried the Primetime Podcast Receiver
a month ago which looked promising but turned out to be a little
buggy with no bittorrent support either. Hopefully it will improve or
iPodder will add auto bookmarkable aac conversion. It is quite tempting
to write something myself building on my two week hack of my MP3 Jukebox (it looks rubbish but functionally was better than any commercial MP3 Jukebox in 2001) .

Bet you did not expect that! Has Paul given up on technology
and turned to the slippery side? Nah of course not; property is vague hobby of
mine and the material is fascinating. Plus when flipping houses you save almost
3% on each transaction (less MLS + Broker fees). Recently I worked on Real
Estate software and have seed ideas for a company if anyone out there has a
million or two in VC money.

So is anyone interested in hearing about my experience? If so speak up and
I’ll post some summaries of what they teach (to the allowed limits, if there
are any – I’ll ask tomorrow), how hard it is to become a Realtor etc.

It took about five hours all-in to move from .Text to Das Blog. Thanks to Michael Earls for his part in dottext2dasblog. I had to make a change to their codebase so my comments would import (I simply made the tool drop bad comments rather than stop the entire import), but that was about the only hiccup in the conversion process. Other issues were just time in setting up dasBlog + trying to make it run alongside .Text - I gave up on that!

Comments won’t be working until my hosting provider tweaks the security on a few new folders – this should happen early on Monday.

Also I have not finished the blog roll + url list, if you are missing it is nothing personal I just wanted to wrap up now. Also if you are ATL .Net blogger please let me know and I’ll add you to the list.

On my current project we wished to impersonate a WebService for test purposes and decided to record live messages using XmlSerialization. For the first few messages I manually implemented code to serialize to a file. This cut-and-paste reuse obviously had to be refactored but I was unhappy manually passing in the filename to every call of the new method since the files are named the same as the webmethod. Somehow the generic serialization code needed to know who called it, or to put it in Jerry’s terms it had to ask ‘Were were I?’. Jerry replied to my first ever blog post and finally I got a chance to use his suggestion:

http://dotnetworkaholic.com/PermaLink,guid,692ca362-89cb-4dad-985f-92aea92ca96b.aspx




http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/customtracelistener.asp

The crux is the StackTrace class which resides in the System.Diagnostics namespace. It is exactly as you might expect – very simple when you know it exists but I believe it would be hard to find using Google etc.

This is the code snippet I used after re-reading Jerry’s Code Project article:

   #region Get the calling method (“Where were I” – courtesy of Jerry Dennany)
   System.Diagnostics.StackTrace st = new System.Diagnostics.StackTrace();
   string methodName = “unknown”;
   if (st.FrameCount > 0)
   {
    System.Diagnostics.StackFrame sf = st.GetFrame(1);
    methodName       = sf.GetMethod().Name;
   }
   #endregion

Being a stickler for simplicity I read the MSDN help and reduced the code to:

   #region Get the calling method name (“Where were I” – courtesy of Jerry Dennany)
   System.Diagnostics.StackTrace st = new System.Diagnostics.StackTrace(1, false);
   string methodName = st.GetFrame(0).GetMethod().Name;
   #endregion

I am not sure that my employer will be sending a Mr. Dennany a check anytime soon, but I appreciated the helpful article. This is a good reminder of why we ‘waste’ so much time with blogs.

Just a heads-up. Love or hate certifications we will likely be hearing that next year for any senior .Net position. Even if you are already MC*.* you don’t have this one which is coming next year:

http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcp/architect/

I stumbled across this while researching MCDBA. Apparently if you are an already MCSD, only two more exams are needed for an MCDBA. It is probably worth the $250 + a couple of months study time – yes Dave I am a slow learner