The guys at google have been busy… they released the news reader yesterday and now a html page creater

http://pages.google.com 

I love seeing competition, who knows maybe there will be a google DESKTOP or OS.

Google launched a new reader (reader.google.com)

 I have been giving it a try.  So far, it is very nice, I like the key controls.  I just switched to rss bandit for my RSS reader of choice.  I may have to use this online.

I have been using the beta I.E. 7.0 for about two weeks now.  It is interesting to see how this version of the browser works.  Microsoft has done their homework in this upgrade.   The major changes that I like are: Tabs, settings, and Favorite groups.  There are a lot more items that are nice, but those seem to be the major ones. 

 A few things are still not working quite write with this version.  When I use MS visual studio 2003 and run my web apps in debug mode the http://localhost does not render on the first load, you have to hit refresh, even though I added that location to trusted security.  I have also noticed that a lot of textbox areas on web sites do not function quite right, there are issues with the backspace.  And the one major issue I have is the lack of right clicking on a link and opening in a new tab.  I have seen that option available on some links, but not all.

Overall it is worth the upgrade.  I was using FireFox almost exclusively for browsing and IE for development.   The reason for using firefox was the tab feature. I like to open a lot of sites and then eventually get to reading them. 

Now I am really starting to think that Microsoft is pushing VB.net over C#. Here is a link to a C# converter to change code in C# over to VB.net. Why would you do this? I am not sure.

But, in addition to the MY.OBJECT feature only in VB.net and now a C# to VB.net converter, I am starting to feel that they are really looking to push VB.

I have been working with VS 2005 a bit. One of the things I keep hearing people talk about, mainly a friend of mine who is using VB.NET 2005, is the “MY.OBJECT“. He was telling me how easy it is to grab a file and to check if the application can touch the network. So I figured I would give this a try. With that said, I should mention that I started with the new version of VS.NET 2005 using C#. I was excited to use the My.computer.network.isavailable. After about 30 min of messing around with help and intellisense to find the MY objects, I gave up and did a quick search. It was then I only realized that the “my objects” are only for VB.net.

Discovering this I was very confused. Why would Microsoft create these simple objects to gather information and not include them in c#? Very dissapointing.

I did some googling and found a few references to a helper object that will bring “MY” features to C#, called “that“. (download that)

After reading some of the comments out there, I found it would be easy to just reference vb and grab the MY logic. To do this you simply have to reference VB in your application “using Microsoft.VisualBasic.MyServices;” You then would have access to the My namespace.

Armed with that information and the joy of turning IISREPORTER PRO into a 2.0 C# app, I have completed about 40% of the re-write.