Well I thought it might be interesting to join Plugoo and give this blog the ability to send instant messages to my computer directly when i'm online or offline.

"Thanks to Plugoo, visitors on your webpage, friends or family, can easily chat with you while visiting your website! Plugoo enables you to chat directly from your Instant Messenger with any visitor of your blog, personal webpage or e-sales site. When you’re logged into your Instant Messenger (Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, AIM, GoogleTalk, Jabber or ICQ), you can receive in real time all the comments of your visitors or any question they might ask, and answer instantly! "

If you would like to use this service as well then simply go to http://www.plugoo.com/  and create your own Plugoo account, following the few very simple steps.

So you can now start messaging me directly by using the link below:

>Message me with Plugoo

Yellow Duck Guy
Greg Olsen

Well in April 2007, New Zealand Labour-led Government extended the daylight savings period to 27 weeks.  What this means to us in IT is that our operating systems (and any other date specific apps) will need to be updated to account for this change.

New Zealand Internal Affairs has a publication about this, which can be found at the link below:

http://www.dia.govt.nz/diawebsite.nsf/wpg_URL/Services-Daylight-Saving-Daylight-saving-to-be-extended?OpenDocument 

You can also find a Daylight Saving blog on MSDN which some helpful tips 'n' tricks, this is located here: http://blogs.msdn.com/nzdst/

There is also a couple of manual options for updating your system, these are defined as:

Method 1: Use the Tzedit.exe utility to manually modify the time zone
Method 2: Update the Windows Registry Directly

See here: http://www.microsoft.com/nz/msdn/timezone/manual.mspx

I have updated my Vista operating system at home via Windows update and the hotfix as been applied successfully.  You notice the information about the Daylight Saving by simply clicking on your clock in the bottom right of your screen on your taskbar (assuming you are using the default layout).  You should get something similar to what is shown below:

Yellow Duck Guy
Greg Olsen

With my previous post I mentioned I would do a sample app to demonstrate how easy it would be to read Gmail email account programmatically using c# code and with a little help from ATOM.NET ( http://atomnet.sourceforge.net/ ).

Bellow is the Program.cs from the sample console application I created for demo purposes. I developed this using Visual Studio 2008, but the latest version was not required in order to achieve this outcome. 

The code simply connects to the Gmail Atom feed here: https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom and sends your credentials (username, password for your email account) and logs into the account and reads the latest email in the inbox. The demo only reads 1 email. You can extend this starting on line 73.

I have put a few comments throughout the code to help with explanations, again just to illustrate how the code is working.  You will notice how ATOM.NET made it very easy reading the XML feed from Google Gmail.

If you want the full Visual Studio 2008 source code of this demo, then you can have it FREE via the link below:

TestCheckGMailEmail.zip (93.4 kb)

If you would like a .NET 2.0 version of the source code then you can add a comment to this posting requesting it, or send me an email to yellow_duck_guy@hotmail.com (Note: there are underscores (_) within the email address).

1: using System;
2: using System.IO;
3: using System.Net;
4: using System.Text;
5: using Atom.Core;
6: using Atom.Core.Collections;
7:  
8: namespace TestCheckGMailEmail
9: {
10:     /// <summary>
11:     /// Console Demo Application Code for checking Gmail Email Account
12:     /// Check out my blog here: http://yellowduckguy.spaces.live.com
13:     /// </summary>
14:     internal class Program
15:     {
16:         // GMAIL URL for Atom Email Reading
17:         private static readonly Uri _gmailServerUri = new Uri("https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom");
18:  
19:         private static void Main(string[] args)
20:         {
21:             ShowAppTitle();
22:             PromptForCredentials();
23:         }
24:  
25:         private static void PromptForCredentials()
26:         {
27:             Console.WriteLine("Enter User Name:");
28:             string username = Console.ReadLine();
29:             Console.WriteLine("Enter Password (Security Note: This will be shown on screen):");
30:             string password = Console.ReadLine();
31:  
32:             ReadGMailEmail(username, password);
33:         }
34:  
35:         private static void ReadGMailEmail(string username, string password)
36:         {
37:             // Remove data input, comment out if you want to keep the input
38:             Console.Clear();
39:             ShowAppTitle();
40:  
41:             Console.WriteLine("Now attempting login ... ");
42:  
43:             WebRequest webRequestGetUrl;
44:             try
45:             {
46:                 // Create a new web-request instance
47:                 webRequestGetUrl = WebRequest.Create(_gmailServerUri);
48:  
49:                 byte[] bytes = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(username + ":" + password);
50:  
51:                 // Add the headers for basic authentication.
52:                 webRequestGetUrl.Headers.Add("Authorization", "Basic " + Convert.ToBase64String(bytes));
53:  
54:                 // Get the response feed
55:                 Stream feedStream = webRequestGetUrl.GetResponse().GetResponseStream();
56:  
57:                 // Load Feed into Atom DLL
58:                 AtomFeed gmailFeed = AtomFeed.Load(feedStream);
59:  
60:                 AtomEntryCollection entries = gmailFeed.Entries;
61:  
62:                 // Clear the screen just before we tell the user more information
63:                 Console.Clear();
64:                 ShowAppTitle();
65:                
66:                 if (entries.Count > 0)
67:                 {
68:                     Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Found {0} email(s)", entries.Count));
69:                     Console.WriteLine(Environment.NewLine);
70:  
71:                     // Read the first email in the inbox only.
72:                     // you can change this section to read all emails.
73:                     for (int i = 0; i < 1; i++)
74:                     {
75:                         AtomEntry email = entries[i];
76:                         Console.WriteLine("Brief details of the first Email in the inbox:");
77:                         Console.WriteLine("Title: " + email.Title.Content);
78:                         Console.WriteLine("Author Name: " + email.Author.Name);
79:                         Console.WriteLine("Author Email: " + email.Author.Email);
80:                         Console.WriteLine(Environment.NewLine);
81:                         Console.WriteLine("Email Content: " + Environment.NewLine);
82:                         Console.WriteLine(email.Summary.Content);
83:                         Console.WriteLine(Environment.NewLine);
84:                         Console.WriteLine("Hit 'Enter' to exit");
85:                         Console.ReadLine();
86:                     }
87:                 }
88:                 else
89:                 {
90:                     Console.WriteLine("No emails found in the inbox");
91:                     Console.WriteLine(Environment.NewLine);
92:                     Console.WriteLine("Hit 'Enter' to exit");
93:                     Console.ReadLine();
94:                 }
95:             }
96:             catch (Exception ex)
97:             {
98:                 // Note: Catching all exceptions as generic exceptions just for demo purposes.
99:                 //       You can be more specific with handled errors
100:                
101:                 Console.Clear();
102:                 ShowAppTitle();
103:                 Console.WriteLine("Oops! An error occurred: " + ex.Message);
104:                 Console.WriteLine(Environment.NewLine);
105:                 Console.WriteLine(Environment.NewLine);
106:                 Console.WriteLine("Hit 'Enter' to exit");
107:                 Console.ReadLine();
108:             }
109:         }
110:  
111:         private static void ShowAppTitle()
112:         {
113:             Console.WriteLine("--------------------------------------------");
114:             Console.WriteLine("Test Application that will check GMail email");
115:             Console.WriteLine("Written By: Greg Olsen, 2nd Sept 2007       ");
116:             Console.WriteLine("Blog: http://yellowduckguy.spaces.live.com     ");
117:             Console.WriteLine("--------------------------------------------");
118:             Console.WriteLine(Environment.NewLine);
119:         }
120:     }
121: }

Yellow Duck Guy
Greg Olsen

Well I stumbled across this the ATOM.NET open source Website today ( http://atomnet.sourceforge.net/ ), which allows you to write an parse Atom feeds.

More info from the Website:

"Atom is a new syndication format (similar to RSS in functionality) but aimed to simplify the task with a simple and clear specification.
Atom.NET is an open source library entirely developed in C# aimed to handle Atom feeds in an handy way. It provides an object model to write and parse Atom feeds. It's compatible only with the 0.3 Atom draft specification."

Current download version is 0.4.3. The compiled DLL library has been built with .net 1.1, but you can hook this in as a project reference with your .NET 1.1,2.0,3.0,3.5 Visual Studio solutions with no problems.

This site got me thinking that this could be very useful. I know personally I would like a Gmail email reader to read some notifications I get sent to a Gmail email account.  So I will probably use ATOM.NET to read them programmatically.  Once I finish the small demo application I will post the source code to get you started.

ATOM.NET download page is here: ATOM.NET Download Page

Yellow Duck Guy
Greg Olsen