Cue Provider for Windows Forms
June 12, 2006
I was reading this post by Daniel Moth about a really simple technique for enabling text ques in TextBoxes. Everytime I see a feature which requires a bit of interop code I automatically think that it is a job for an extender provider. This was no exception.
On our internal TFS installation I created a team project a month or so ago to hold useful snippets of code that our consultants put together. It hasn’t seen much use yet but I thought that I could create an extender provider to simply what Daniel demonstrates on his post. Here is a screenshot of the extender provider actually working.
If you would find this useful feel free to download the latest build of the library. Add the DLL to your ToolBox then drag the CueProvider component onto the design surface. You should then be able to fill in the “Cue” property under the “Appearance” category.
Particle Physics HTML DOM Visualiser
June 12, 2006
I saw a link to this stuff on Cameron Reilly’s blog. Its a 2D visualisation of the DOM structure of my homepage. Each of the different colours represents a different category of HTML element. As you can see my blog template really is tag soup (but I suspect that it isn’t the worst out there).
The Java applet uses a particle physics library to do all the hard work so all the front end code as to do is render the object graph. I’d love to see this library ported to .NET. I thought I might be able to get the source and compile it under J# as a first pass, but it doesn’t seem to be available.
BlogML is live on CodePlex!
June 12, 2006
Darren has posted BlogML up onto CodePlex and will be managing its development there. I think BlogML is an idea whose time has come. With a vast number bloggers looking to migrate content away from their first hosting provider to one that better suites their needs there is increased pressure on those hosting the content to provide an export facility.
Some of them are rolling their own formats, but BlogML seeks to provide a standard blog archive format which takes all your content.
One day I’ll move my blog off this rotting version of .TEXT 
