Hello. I am Paul Kinlan.

Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 is now available for download to MSDN Universal subscribers. I'm excited about this release and will be posting examples soon. Check out the product page and the uninstallation instructions for previous versions if you plan to upgrade.

I'm exploring different web services, particularly for UK retailers like Tesco, Asda, or Virgin. I've tried Amazon's, which is decent, and Yahoo's, which I like. Ebay's looks interesting, but I'd rather not pay. I'm also looking at Alexa's and Google's. It's tough finding good resources on this, especially for UK retailers. I'd love to see APIs from companies like Tescos, Asda, Dixons, and others. If you know of any good web services, especially in the UK retail space, please share!

This post explores how to access and iterate through a user's Internet Explorer Favorites in C#. I've included C# code that retrieves the Favorites directory and recursively iterates through its folders and files. The code also parses the .URL files to extract the actual URLs. Currently, the code doesn't retrieve the friendly name displayed in the Favorites menu (e.g., "Microsoft" instead of "www.microsoft.com"), but I'm looking into using IShellLink for this and would appreciate any insights.

I finally took my own advice and watched the MSDN videos, specifically "Designing .NET Class Libraries: Member Types." I was impressed with the discussion on .NET class library design principles, especially regarding method overloading and cohesion. I highly recommend checking it out and plan to incorporate these best practices into my own coding.

I've been exploring Amazon's SOAP API and Yahoo's REST API and I'm quite impressed with both. I'm thinking about ways to make these two APIs interact and will share my ideas in a future post. I've also been working on using REST in .Net 1.1, which is a little tricky but possible, thanks to Martin G. Brown's work. The process involves using an XSD of the response, running it through XSD.exe to generate a Dataset object, and then processing the results. It's a similar concept to WSDL, but without the automatic stub generation. I'll post some Yahoo API code examples soon. I plan to look into Google's API as well, even though it's in beta with usage restrictions.

This blog post explores the arguments for and against Binary XML. While some argue that Binary XML addresses XML's verbosity, text processing speed, and inability to store binary data, I question its practicality. I've found that XML's drawbacks can be mitigated through compression and concise tags. Binary XML raises concerns about readability, schema management, querying, and the potential for increased complexity. The post links to external resources offering further insights into the debate.

I'm excited about the new MSDN .NET Framework Developer Center on designing class libraries! It looks like a promising series based on internal Microsoft training, with a focus on API design best practices. Brad Abrams is presenting, and the content is being released weekly. Check out the introductory article!

A quick test post to check if everything's working. Planning to share learnings about C#, C# 2.0, and .NET Framework soon.