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"Data! data! data!" he cried impatiently. "I can't make bricks without clay."
— Sherlock Holmes to Dr. Watson in "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches" by Arthur Conan Doyle.

"I like deadlines," cartoonist Scott Adams once said. "I especially like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."

"There is nothing like that feeling of spending days and days banging your head against a wall trying to solve a programming problem then suddenly finding that one tiny obscure and seemingly unrelated piece of the puzzle that unlocks the solution. Oh yeah!"

- Chris Maunder, CodeProject Newsletter 28 Jan 2002

"Management at eSnipe, which is me, is also feeling the pain of the 2002 bear market. So rather than pout about it, I bought some stuff on eBay that I really didn’t need, but made me feel better."

- Tom Campbell, president of eSnipe

Wednesday, May 07, 2003

6:30:39 PM Ripping Data on the Web - How to recover and repackage information on the World Wide Web

7:13:50 AM YARR Yet Another RSS Reader. While preparing for our one day pre-conference tutorial at VS Connections, I decided to build YARR (Yet Another RSS Reader) as a sample application. I felt it was a particularly interesting sample application since it represented the intersection of four different technology spheres: XML, [D]HTML, SQL, and C#. I presented it to our students in the class in about an hour or so. I also presented it as an application that is ripe for code generation since I feel that code generation lets you efficiently capture cross-technology abstractions. I'm placing a drop of the source code for YARR here, for anyone who may be interested in taking a look. To install / setup the code, you need to run the SQL script from solutionsql in the ZIP file. I have a nice little command-line batch file that will run the osql command line utility from you. Just modify the script to point to your SQL server, and optionally change the login that you want to use to create the database schema. The only other bit of tweaking you might want to do is to copy the included default.htm file to the c:temp directory (or modify the sources to read the default HTML page that is displayed in IE from somewhere else). Comments / feedback would be welcome. Next up tomorrow is to rewrite this sample app using code generation.[IUnknown.com: John Lam's Weblog on Software Development]