Shannon Braun's Weblog

I upgraded to dasBlog 1.8 the other day and that broke my InfoPath Blog Client.  dasBlog had made some changes to the API on adding posts.  Since dasBlog is still running under the 1.1 .NET Framework, and I no longer have the Visual Studio 2003 IDE installed anywhere I did some poking around the net to see if anyone was using the Whidbey IDE to compile 1.1 code.  Sure enough there was a post from one of the MSBuild developers that gives you a step by step process for getting it to work. 

 

It is surprisingly simple.  You can find the post here.   It says Beta 2 on the post it worked fine with the RTM version.  The catch was that I had to delete and re-reference some assemblies I was referencing.

Ran across this one the other day.  For those of you that don't know what a Visualizer is you can find out about there incorporation into Visual Studio 2005 on MSDN.  For those of you who are still stuck using the old IDE, someone has spent the time to write an add-in that is an Xml Visualizer for Visual Studio 2003.  It is found on GotDotNet.

Parsing Html with regular expressions can be an excruciating experience.  The cryptic syntax can take hours to get right.  What if you could treat malformed html like xml and use XPath to select the html tags you were looking for.

 

The HtmlAgility pack allows you to do just that.  It handles parsing the Html document and making navigable via XPath (implements the IXPathNavigable interface).  It also has facilities for downloading the HTML from a Url.  After the document has been parsed you have the capability to update the document.  In addition, there is examples of how to:

 

 

I recently used it to create an implementation for the RFC Standard 2557, also known as MIME Encapsulation of Aggregate Documents or Mht Web Archive files.  The same files you create in Internet Explorer by selecting File --> Save As and then modify the file type to be Web Archive. 

 

The implementation I wrote is based on this article Convert any URL to a MHTML archive using native .NET code that I found on CodeProject a while back.  The CodeProject implementation was written in VB.Net and used regular expressions heavily.  In addition, the first version of the implementation was file based and required all of the files to be written to disk before they were embedded into a single mht file.  The later version offers an in memory option so the files no longer need to be persisted to the disk. 

 

The implementation I wrote is based in C# and relies on the HtmlAgility pack to do the heavy lifting of parsing the Html for external resources.  I did have to use one regular expression to find the @import directives with in a style tag. 

 

Here is the code written to create a mht file:

 

 

Below is an example capture of a web page using the implementation I wrote.  It's a snapshot of my brothers blog.