Extending the screensaver in C# Express Beta1

Note: I updated for “correct“ naming for Express... marketing folks, let me know if I got it right this time ;-)

 

Friday was the CLR PM team’s appbuilding day. I decided to pull my head out of WinFX land and check out C# Express Beta1. I just LOVE this concept… I think it is a great example of how we are trying to build up the community of students and hobbyists, etc.

So I did the whole “customer experience” thing and installed the C# Express right off the public web site. I had a little trouble here, partially because my machine had a very hold Whidbey runtime installed and partially due to some known issues with ISA. (The folks over in VS Setup land where very helpful in getting me up and running).

I decided to play around with the RSS ScreenSaver starter kit that ships with C# Expres. I have always been fascinated when looking at my referral log with the interesting hits I get from customers googling for information. Many times I can tell they got what they were after in that entry of mine and other times I get inspired to post a new entry that will help the next person. Here are a few I thought were interesting:

"timezones"

“switch c#“

“curly in string.format“

“pascal casing“

“delphi tokensessionid“

“c# resourcemanager.getobject“

“linkedlists vb“

“c# switch string“

“windows longhorn video“

“string.format“

“designing error codes“

“enter escape char c#“

So I extended the screensaver by adding a new area that displays the most current 100 referrals from google in my blog. I had a lot of help from code I “borrowed” from Raymond Chen but still had a lot of fun. Here is an example of what the screensaver looks like now.

Please feel free to check out the source and binaries, keep in mind this is just a couple of hours of hacking, so don’t expect something beautiful.

One tip, if you want to install it as your screensaver, you need to copy RSSScranSaverUpdate.exe into your %windir%\system32 directory and rename it RSSScranSaverUpdate.scr. Then it will show up in the screensaver drop downbox from the control panel.

 Enjoy.