I’m pleased to announce that I have a couple of new features in this release of SharpMT and not as pleased to announce that a proposed feature is being abandoned. Either way, you are truly going to be forced into service as beta testers with this release for a couple of reasons. One is that this was compiled using an evaluation copy of VS.NET 2003 – as my real copy is still on backorder – which means that the 1.1 release of the .NET Framework is now required to run this version of SharpMT. I’m also including a new control with this release, so there could be some installation issues as well. That’s what a beta is all about, after all. That and some new features of course…

First the bad news: No WYSIWYG support should be expected in future releases or SharpMT. Here’s the deal with this decision: I planned on using an HTML control from Steve at FurryGoat.com to offer a WYSIWYG option of authoring. When I started to integrate Steve’s control, I discovered that the Spell Check control that I’ve been using – and plan to release when I can afford to – doesn’t like the HTML control. Truth be told, I’m more interested having my drafts spell checked than I am in typing them WYSIWYG. I usually use only bold, italic, and URL markup tags and occasionally the unordered list tags; not enough to justify a full blown WYSIWYG UI in my biased opinion. As I wrote SharpMT because I needed a tool, I had the swaying vote here. Another blue note with this and future releases will be the size of the application: the install package has doubled in size to about 2.8MB due to the now required HTML library file.

And now for the “good stuff”. There were two new bugs that were introduced by the new .NET Framework, discovered via some users’ feedback. For any stored Draft, the saved setting for “Comments” will be lost. Any existing list of Blog Links will have lost their ID’s and will not be loaded correctly. Both of these errors were caused by a change in the XML Parser and this is well beyond my control. However, the fix for both bugs is easy enough. For Drafts: The first time any existing draft (from 1.1 Beta 1 or earlier) is opened with Beta 2 (or later) the “default” settings for Comments will be applied to the existing drafts. After this first open, the new Comment settings will be stored and retrieved properly. For Blog Links: select “Replace old links with new links” and enter a high number of links to download. This will clear the list and download a new set of links with valid ID’s. After you’ve updated the list of Blog Links, you can return the setting in the Options dailog to “Add newer links to list”.

I found another bug in the Add URL dialog that was caused by the .NET upgrade. Seems that the KeyUp Event is no long as responsive as it used to be, so the “Wanna-Be-Auto-Fill” section of code was re-written to use other Events and seems to be better now. It also now stores 20 previously used URL’s rather than the original 9.

There are two new tabs – as well as two corresponding menu items in the Window menu – that relate to Edit Mode and Preview Mode. This is where Steve’s HTML control will come into play. Edit Mode is the window that you’ve used all along. Preview Mode will take the current draft’s Title, Primary Category, Entry Body, Extended Entry, and Excerpt values and show them in an HTML preview window. Since I work under the premise that very few HTML tags will be used in Blog writing, I put a new twist on this Preview Mode thing to make it a bit more useful: previews can be “skinned” using the Preview Template.

The Preview Template is an HTML file that’s named previewHtml.htm and it lives in the SharpMT directory; a sample one was included with the installation. Some information on this file:

• The file must be named previewHtml.htm
• HEAD information is ignored by the control
• STYLE information can be included in the BODY section of the page; separate CSS files are not supported at this time
• The five MT-based Template tags are used for substitution. For example, to show the Title in the Preview, use the tag <MTEntryTitle> in the previewHtml.htm file.
• The previewHtml.htm page is reloaded whenever you switch from Edit Mode to Preview Mode; this makes it easy to troubleshoot the Preview Template

Some updated screenshots of the new UI:

That should be it for this release – you can download Beta 2 from here.