The ecto has landed

The update of Kung-Log blogging tool, ecto, has been released today. I only have a few minutes of spare time this morning to try it out before having to leave for work (what a drag, huh?) and it immediately gives me some inspiration for my own blogging tool project.

Right now my blogging tool spawns a new window for ‘advanced’ post options such as extended body, excerpts, etc. I did not like it in the beginning and I still do not like it now. But I’ve been concentrating on the backend code that only during this week that I have time to work on the GUI.

ecto uses tabs to separate basic post elements (title and description) from the extended elements. Doh! Why did I think of that before? So now I just have to implement tabs in my tool too as it is such a obvious solution to my GUI problem. One of the reason I did not think of using tabs before is my less than thrilling experience in implementing tabs in VC++/MFC back in the old days. Hopefully now most of the leg work will have been done by the .NET framework.

Another feature of ecto is the option for local storage of the posts. I’ve that idea for my tool before ecto release and I’ve implemented a method for each data class called ToXml() to return the XML data in XmlDocument type. Thus as the code work itself up the class hierarchy, by the time the code reaches the TypePad class the only thing to do is save the accumulated XmlDocument object(s) to file.

Next is to implement an overloaded constructor for each data class to accept a XmlDocument to pre-populate data as each object is created during the application load up process.

Update: I was just reading something about .Net Web Services and came across the XmlSerializer class in the System.Xml.Serialization namespace. Doh!!! Should have known serialization is much easier in .Net, instead of doing it by hand…