Intellisense not working via COM

I recently needed to write a class in C# that would be accessed by a VB6 application – something quite new to me.

The existing VB6 application (which is in the process of being rewritten in C#) currently uses OLE Automation to generate MSWord documents based on templates. While this approach was working fine it was pretty slow. Having made the decision that the new version of the application would be capable of generating Word 2007 documents it was decided that the resulting class should be accessible to the VB6 application via COM Interop.
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Reading an RSS Feed with C# and Python

When I started this site I had a project in mind that would download Podcasts as they were posted and maintain the content of my MP3 player so that I didn’t have to do it myself. Well since then I have lost my iTunes virginity and while it doesn’t do everything that I wanted (like telling me that a new episode has been downloaded) it does automatically download and delete them once I’ve watched/listened to them.

But just because I don’t need to develop a complete application there is still an itch to scratch here – a few of them in fact.

• How do I download an RSS stream – it’s not just podcasts that uses them
• How do I parse the resulting XML
• How do I download a file and store it locally
• and how do I do this in C# and Python

Well this post will answer the first two questions using C# and LINQ and Python and it’s XML library.
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Dirty Checking and the .NET GridView

Most Web Developers have come across this problem at one time or another, how do I stop someone navigating away from a page if they have not saved any changes they have made?

The answer is that you need to employ ‘Dirty Checking’, basically set a flag when the page data is changed and check it if the user tries to navigate away. Sounds simple (and in many instances it maybe) but I have encountered a problem recently (today!) which took some thought to get around. Read the rest of this entry »