Viewing RSS feeds in a browser

It's an obvious little trick and I don't know why I hadn't thought of it before, but MSDN have updated their RSS feeds with a reference to an XSL so that browsers that support XSL will render the feed as XHTML rather than displaying the source.

All it does is to force the browser to transform the rss xml to XHTML thus:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<?xml-stylesheet type='text/xsl' href='rsspretty.xsl' version='1.0'?>
<rss xmlns:msdn="http://msdn.microsoft.com/aboutmsdn/rss/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:msdndomain="http://msdn.microsoft.com/aboutmsdn/...
rss/domains" version="2">

   <channel>

      <title>MSDN: Visual C#</title>

      ...

   </channel>

</rss>

Google Desktop Search

Have you seen this new Desktop search tool from Google? Essentially it's a search engine/application for use on your local machine, rather than the web. By default it indexes all files on your machine.

Google Desktop Search finds:

• Outlook / Outlook Express
• Word
• AOL Instant Messenger
• Excel
• Internet Explorer
• PowerPoint
• Text

A neat trick (which I guess it does with cookies for the www.google.com site) is that it puts a link on the existing www.google.com site to search your desktop instead of the web. A nice thing that it does is that it searches your Outlook emails - and returns results in super quick time! From a technical point of view, what it looks like is that it installs some kind of mini-web server - you search through the browser on an address of http://127.0.0.1:xxxx/.

Using Reflection to Bind Business Objects to ASP.NET Form Controls

This looks like a really useful way to simplify databinding ASP.NET controls to a generic business object. I've yet to use this in a fully fledged live project and so I'm not sure how accurate their performance metrics are. Off the top of my head I think I would implement these two methods 'BindControlsToObject' and 'BindObjectToControls' in a new class derived from the Page object, but whatever takes your fancy really.