My article on combining AIM Call Out with geocoding a phone number to display the location of the person you're trying to call has gone live on the AOL Developer Network.

I think it turned into a very cool sample application.

Dial a number and see the location of the person you're calling!

The article I wrote about building a Voice over IP .NET application using AIM Call Out and the AOL Open Voice API has just gone live on the AOL Developer Network. Read it here.

I'm currently doing some work with MapQuest and ran into the situation that I need to define styles for point of interest. From a code point of view I would like an enumeration, but the MapQuest API defines a series of strings to specify the style you wish to use. With C#3.0 I can now add a method to an enumeration using an extension method.

The sample below shows an enumeration for stars and an extension method for getting the value of that enumeration as a string:

public enum Stars : int
{
    Red = 31,
    Green = 32,
    Blue = 33,
    Yellow = 34,
    Orange = 35,
    Purple = 36,
    White = 37,
    Black = 38,
    Gray = 39,
    Gold = 40
}

public static class StarsExtension
{
    public static string Value( this Stars enumerator )
    {
        int v = (int) enumerator;
        return "MQ000" + v.ToString();
    }
}

I can now use this as follows:

string s = Stars.Gold.Value();

My article for the Software Developer Network Magazine has been printed in the magazine. If you don't receive the magazine you can read the article here.

My article on the AOL Developer Network about how I created the NFL Video of the Day gadget for Windows Vista went live last week.

Download the gadget here.

The article I wrote for AOL, 'Xdrive as Data Storage Device for Windows Vista Gadgets', got published on their site this week. I'm pretty happy with it. It gives a step by step account of how to create a Vista gadget and also shows how to use AJAX to upload a file, which had me up debugging stuff for quite some time.

I just finished my sample of the week for my AOL blog. This week I created code to upload a file to XDrive using the HttpWebRequest object. The sample is also useful if you're trying to find out more about uploading a file using C# (or the .NET Framework).

.NET 2.0 has no special support for REST and JSON. That doesn't mean you can't call a REST resource and pass it a JSON object. In my weekly AOL post I demonstrate how to use WebRequest, WebResponse and basic string manipulation to call a REST resource and pass a JSON object.

I did some more research on the settings part of Windows Vista gadgets and storing username/passwords in plain text in your settings is not a smart thing to do.

You can use the JavaScript code below to do basic encryption and decryption.

        function encrypt( plainString )
	{
            if ( plainString == "" ) return "";

            var xor_key = 2;
            var result = "";
            for( i = 0; i < plainString.length; ++i)
            {
		result += String.fromCharCode( xor_key ^ plainString.charCodeAt(i) );
            }
            return result;
	}

	function decrypt( encryptedString ) 
	{
            if ( encryptedString == "" ) return "";
            var xor_key = 2;
            var result;

            for( i = 0; i <  encryptedString.length; i++)
            {
		result += String.fromCharCode( xor_key ^ encryptedString.charCodeAt(i));
            }
	    return result;
	}

Read more background info here.

I just finished working on my first Windows Vista gadget.

It's a small gadget which sits in the sidebar and shows the amount of free space on you AOL XDrive (5GB of free online space).

Download the gadget here.

Read more about the making of... on my AOL blog.

I've completed a comprehensive sample application integrating Windows Communication Foundation, ASP.NET and TRUVEO search into a custom search engine. Check it out here.

I've just posted a new blog entry on my AOL blog. I think it turned out really cool!

I use Windows Communication Foundation 3.5 (beta 2) to create a service contract, data contract and client channel and then connect to a non WCF, REST based service.

More on: http://dev.aol.com/node/595.

Read my AOL post on using XmlDocument to invoke the REST based AOL Video Search here.

My publishing agent, StudioB, has landed me a great job as part the AOL blogging team and the AOL editiorial board. AOL has a number of cool service based API's, like AOL Video Search, AIM, OpenAuth and manu more. I'll be writing articles and blog posts about using these API's in C# and .NET.

I've been given my own blog space on http://dev.aol.com, check it out at: http://dev.aol.com/blog/22109.

AOL just released a cool gadget for the Vista sidebar.

It's still in beta and 'hangs' every now and again. This does not affect the rest of Vista though and all other gadget keep running too.
Download at: http://dev.aol.com/video_gadget.

Main annoyance so far is that in Medium mode it tries to show how long ago the video was posted, but this takes most of the space in the subtitle bar. This can be changed by going to the preference page and changing the settings for Playback size to 'Large'. The subtitles now scroll.

Update: The hanging occurs when the AOL video service cannot be reached.