As part of my process of moving the Tourney Bracket Control to .NET 2.0, I had to revisit signing. We sign our control, and we did it through the AssemblyInfo.cs file in 1.1. That doesn't work in 2.0.

You now have to do it through the properties of the project, and you point to your key file, and then tell it whether you want it delay-signed or not. I'm not sure I like that or not. Either way, the one thing I don't like is that it copies my key file to the root of project folder. I keep our keys in a keys folder at the root of my source hierarchy, and did this so that I could keep the keys in one place. Now, VS.NET wants to copy my key files all over the place. I guess that's not a huge deal, but it doesn't seem necessary to me.

WallyM (Sir Wally?) also posted about this issue, and he has graphics!

I'm starting to research what it's going to take to write the Tourney Bracket Control in ASP.NET 2.0, and I found the first cool new feature.

There's a new base class for custom controls. Before, if you were doing anything remotely complicated (i.e, not adding functionality to an existing server control), your choices were Control and WebControl.

Now you have a new choice: CompositeControl. This is specifically designed for…you guessed it. Composite controls. It implements INamingContainer for you, and any time the controls collection is accessed (both run-time and design-time), it calls EnsureClientControls() for you.

Changing our base class was painless - I already implemented INamingContainer and already overrode EnsureClientControls(), so it was just a matter of changing Control to CompositeControl.

Oddly enough, just the other day I watched this webcast about how the enterprise Library is being applied "in the wild." One of the guys on the video talked about releasing a data tier generator he wrote.

Well, today, I saw this user sample come across, which is just that. Nice!

This is completely off-topic, but I found a link to Google Sight Seeing, and it's pretty cool. It's a site that highlights interesting satellite images that people have found.

I spent some time a week ago going through all of their archives while watching TV, and finding some cool places. I mainly looked for places that I've been, such as Boston and New York, but Atlanta's and Los Angeles' highway system impressed me the most. Not sure why, but it was very cool.

It's also pretty cool to see some of the airplanes in-flight, and their shadows on the ground.

This'll be a shortened version due to the holiday, and the fact that I'm about 3 days behind on reading my feeds. No time to read when you spend the weekend on Spring Lake and Lake Michigan. It's OK though. There's not much news this week anyway. With that, here's what I saw that's newsworthy this week.

The next version of iTunes will support podcasting. Smart move - this basically kills iPodder doesn't it?

Speaking of Apple, are they considering using Intel processors? Does this mean I can run OS X or whatever will be the latest when it launches on my PC-based machine?

Microsoft announced Virtual Earth, a competitor to Google Earth. Being second to market, they have to offer something better than the first one to market or they lose. So what did Microsoft add? 45 degree angles, and what looks like closer shots. I guess that qualifies!
(Sean Alexander, Unofficial Microsoft Blog)

StartSomethingPC.com is open for submissions. Apparently, the kit download has been downloaded 3 times more than expected. I would like to see a few of the entries.

The author of bittorrent launched a torrent search engine. Neither the MPAA nor the RIAA could be reached for comment. Something about filing a lawsuit.

The Start Something Amazing campaign started - how has Windows XP helped you bring your passions to life! Tell Microsoft, and you could be meeting with BillG himself.

Roadcasting? Cool idea, but it'll have to take off in bigger cities. I don't see it catching on in Spring Lake any time soon.

Hacker holds documents hostage for $200. Dr. Evil comes to mind.

Will Y! Music raise it's prices? Steve Jobs is in his office pool for 5 months.

Blogebrity Magazine. Did you make the list? And where's Instapundit?

Grafolilious - delicious via graphs. Cool.

The Gillmor Gang is back! I can't wait to listen to this again. Oh yeah, the Gillmor Daily's RSS enclosures seem to be working too now.

That's it! In case there's a question - no this won't typically mean these will be the only posts. I just had a busy week, and am working on some code that's been giving me issues. I'll get some posts out soon!

Well, here it goes! The inaugural edition of RossCode Weekly. We'll see how it goes. Let me know what you think!

New MSN Toolbar with Desktop Search released. I installed it, and I've been happy with it so far. The memory footprint seems to be smaller than before. But the best feature is still the deskbar shortcuts.

Microsoft to offer corporate desktop search. Sounds like Google already is.

Internet Explorer 7 will have tabs. Maxthon already provides that, but a few of the plug-ins and toolbars don't work with it. Hopefully I won't have to worry about that now.

IBM has released their blogging guidelines, which is good, but some question if it's really corporate blogging if the rules don't really allow for engaging in a conversation with your customers

NantRunner has been updated. The previous version didn't work for me, so hopefully this one will.

NASA WorldWind on a PocketPC? Very cool.

Todd Cochrane from GeekNewsCentral published a book on Podcasting. He's done more than 60 episodes, and has changed up his equipment numerous times over that period. He's probably about as close to an expert as you're going to find.

Microsoft announced OneCare to a mixed reception. Dan Gillmor and Robert Scoble go back and forth about it. Dan says we shouldn't have to pay to help Microsoft clean up it's mess. Robert says "we're getting better." I'd agree with Robert.

Jeremy Ensight wants writers to help out with his business blogging book. Speaking of business blogging books, two new chapters of Naked Conversations were posted this week, including one about consultants.

Blo.gs is sold. Most blogging software pings blo.gs, so this could be interesting, depending on what the buyer does with it. If they turn it into a blog search engine, then they could have a good application on their hands.

Microsoft to buy Red Hat? Of course it's on Slashdot, so it's taken with a grain of salt, but it's an interesting thought isn't it? If Microsoft did, would this lend more credibility (and resources) to Mono?

Newsgator buys FeedDemon. My newsreader of choice at the moment (Newsgator Outlook Edition) is getting a friend on the desktop. This makes sense for Newsgator since rumor has it that some people don't use Outlook.

Rush Limbaugh to start Podcasting. His show has been available to download in MP3 format for a while, but never as an official podcast. Can Bob & Tom be far behind?

Google Adsense for RSS moves into Beta. A limited beta. As in MovableType and blogger only. I was denied access to it, which isn't surprising really. Only having 6 readers isn't sufficiently large enough for them! On the bright side, Dave Winer can still link to me!

Yahoo! Announces Media RSS 1.0. This adds the ability to have multiple enclosures in each RSS feeds. I seem to remember Winer saying this was bad. I don't remember why, but I do remember it. I guess he deserves some respect in this area. You know, the whole "invented RSS" thing and all. Seriously, though. Do we really need another distinct syndication format?

Two Xbox Items. First, the Xbox 360 will be at least semi-backwards compatible, and second, Mountain Dew will give away 9,000 Xbox 360's starting in August. If you've ever met me, then you'll know I've got the inside track on one of those!

One of the best code generation tools I've ever used, CodeSmith, released version 3.0 this week. Also, Rob Howard announced that CodeSmithTools, LLC, is a partnership with Telligent Systems. The only downside to CodeSmith now? It's not free anymore, but it's good enough that it warrants a purchase.

Winer vs. Curry: There's been a lot of back and forth between the two of them over an interview in Wired magazine that didn't sit well with Dave. Read the story here. The two of them are both giving keynotes at Gnomedex in June. That could be interesting.

Yahoo! Music released their "all you can consume" music service for $4.99 per month. This definitely undercuts two groups. 1.) The RIAA. No longer can they claim that downloading music causes huge monetary damages - it's $5/month, and 2.) Napster and any other music service. Why pay $14.99 when you can get it for $5 from a reputable source?

With the release of the final Star Wars movie on May 19th, we'll stay technical. Carl Franklin explains why Luke Skywalker is design pattern, and George Lucas is a great programmer.

Steve Gillmor is back with the Gillmor Daily. If you ever listened to the old Gillmor Gang podcasts, this is a good start. I'm still waiting for the Gang to come back though. Anyway, read the comments on the first show. Last I checked, things went from good to bad in a hurry! And where are the enclosures?

My Google? Well, not exactly. It's called Fusion, but it's basically Google's answer to My MSN and My Yahoo. No RSS integration yet though, and only 12 sources. Of course, there's promise of more.

Bloglines is planning to be a blog search engine by the middle of the summer. It'll be better than Pubsub, Technorati, and Feedster. But wait. Isn't Google already a blog search engine? You just can't subscribe…yet.

Y!Q? Contextual Search using Yahoo's search engine. You can even add it to your own site.

A minor revision of CruiseControl.NET was released today. Here's the release notes.

It looks like it offers a few new things that are pretty cool. You can now install the service more than once, allowing a name to be given to the service. That's cool.

It also now shows timings for the build if you're running RC3 of Nant, which I am. Looks like it's time to upgrade!

MetaSapiens, via Fabrice Marguerie, has released their first product, and it's free! It's a cool component for managing URLs called PageMethods. It makes using URLs much easier, or at least it looks like it does.

We ran into these same issues, and our solution was to make constant classes that contained virtual paths to each page, and then a class for valid query strings by page as well as the valid values for query strings (if appropriate). For example, if your page has three display modes and you manage those ways through querystrings, we'd have four constants:

DisplayModeParam = "DisplayMode";
DisplayModeSimple = "Simple";
DisplayModeComplex = "Complex";
DisplayModeNormal = "Normal";

This way, we could build URLs and querystrings in code, and have them type checked. Of course, had PageMethods been available at the time, we probably would have used that instead.

I'm finally making some progress on my Podcast backlog. At one point, I was up to almost 100 hours of back log. I started pairing down the list and listening to some, and now I'm down to less than 45 hours.

While I've been going through them, I've finally gotten around to listening to Ron Jacob's two podcasts about the Delta Lounge. The Delta Lounge is the room where Enterprise Library was developed. There's some good content there, including good conversations about why a central room for development is valuable and how continuous integration is a great thing! Anyway, give them a listen. They're pretty short.

Part 1 (mp3): 17 minutes
Part 2 (mp3): 22 minutes

Jeremy Miller has another good post about what constitutes quality unit tests.

He says one thing that I've seen debated elsewhere. Unit tests should be order independent. Steven Smith has a post arguing that a unit test relying on another one might not be so bad. At first I was skeptical for the same reasons Jeremy lists - mainly relying on "dirty data" but if you read Steven's post, you'll find that's not why he wants test dependency. His example shows what he's talking about. If your unit test that connects to a database fails, what's the point of running all of the tests that rely on that connection?

I think both points are valid, but I don't think we'll see it in Nunit any time soon. The Nunit purists will fight it because of the possibility for abuse. Personally, I think you make the tools powerful enough to do what needs to be done, and if people abuse them, then that's their problem.