The latest beta of Visual Studio 2005 included a license that allows people to “Go Live” with applications: developers are allowed to offer applications that have been coded on VS2005 to the general public.

And Go Live, I shall: the first beta of SharpMT 3 is now available. And yes, you’ll need the Beta 2 release of the 2.0 version of the .NET Framework.

You’d like that after all the crap I’ve had to put up with for requiring the 1.1 release of the .NET Framework for SharpMT that I wouldn’t want to be bleeding edge and require a beta of another version of the Framework. Well… tough.

You heard me… tough. Having the Framework installed won’t hurt anything: 1.1 and 2.0 can live side-by-side and each .NET application is smart enough to know which Framework it uses and then uses that version seamlessly. The simple truth is that I wanted take the Beta 1 release of Visual Studio for a nice little test drive, and this is another part of that.

What’s new in the application? Sadly, not too much. In moving from VS 2003 to VS 2005, I re-wrote most of the application, for at least two reasons. One I was forced to make, since a lot of my C++-esque tricks no longer worked in C# (damn the added thread security!). Another reason was to refresh the code, since my pseudo-Hungarian notation was no longer “acceptable” for .NET programmers, and I started SharpMT long before I gave into that trend.

I also wanted to switch to the newer controls that the new Framework is offering. This includes an integrated HTML control (for Preview) and a new pass at Menus/Toolbars (rather than sticking with a third party set, I use the built-in menus and they rather “modern”). There were a couple of other tweaks as I went…

Of course it wouldn’t be a beta without some disclaimers… one is for the Blog Links list: if this is set to auto-hide, the menu will get a little screwy… particularly for selections: you’ll have to make them twice, since the first click just causes the menu to blink. If the list isn’t auto-hiding itself, the menu works fine. Also, if you are using SharpMT with an RSS Reader (via IBlogExtension) things can get complication. There’s a SharpMTPlugIn.dll and a SharpMTPlugIn2.dll. Both talk to SharpMT 3 but the first is for RSS Readers that use the .NET Framework 1.1 – the second is for when Readers start to support 2.0.

Plans for the future? This is where there’s some bad news coming… in all honesty, I’m pretty happy with what SharpMT does now. There’s been requests to start supporting MT3’s Future tag, but since MT seems to have gone out of it’s way to bollocks that up, I’m reluctant to work on it: it’s a painful request. There’s been other requests for adding GPS or GPS-via-WiFi support… I tried the WiFi one and it told me I was in the Atlantic Ocean and I don’t own a GPS device: translation? I don’t have much interest in it and GPS people can write their own plug-in for it, if they want it that bad… The Pocket version? I won’t say no on this, yet, but I have to admit it: I’m not too interested in this direction either. I don’t have a PDA nor do I want to buy one anytime soon. Same with the SmartPhone edition – trying to blog with a phone keypad is almost worse than trying to blog via a PSP device. Icky.

I’ll continue to spruce up the current bits as VS evolves. Maybe I’ll add new features, but maybe I won’t… no promises and no lies!

Download: .NET Framework, version 2.0 – Beta 2 (required to run SharpMT 3)

Download SharpMT [3.0 Release]: EXE | MSI

View SharpMT FAQ: FAQ