public virtual MemoryStream

Luke,

I emailed you about this yesterday but I guess you're a busy man... ;)

once again you pulled of a nicer, better working version of SharpReader. I've been using your program for quite some time now and really, there's no better alternative. So therefore my compliments!

One problem, some RSS feeds have comment feeds, and whenever new comments arrive SharpReader says that channel has new posts. Is this a setting? Obviously, in some way the channel does have new posts (since comments have changed) but to be honest, its quite annoying because I end up opening SharpReader a lot more times then I'd want to.

Not sure if this means anything to you, or if this is considered a problem.

Anyways, congratulations on SharpReader!

(ps. bogus email adres obviously. Just check your mail to get my real emailadress)

Hi luke,

i don't know if it's the right place for this, but i have a problem quite annoying with SharpReader.
It concerns the browser cache of Sharp who seems to keep cached copy of webpages. Problem is when new comments appears on the RSS. If i double-click on the page to show it completly, the new comments won't appear. If i want to do so, i have to right-click et refresh the page.

thanks you,

Julien
julien-AT-midiway.fr

Luke, thank you for the latest version of SharpReader. After trying out the many RSS readers on the market these last 12 months yours has become a mainstay on my system. I tested many readers a fair amount of time but always kept SharpReader as my referance because it ran so well. And now with the release 0951 I'm even more entrenched with SharpReader. I appreciate the many hours of hard work you poured into making SharpReader an even better RSS reader.

as has been mentioned, i also could not find the appropriate area to post a question about sharpreader...

i wanted to know if this was by design, or is a flaw. when using shift+delete to delete all non-locked items in a feed, the current feed entry that is highlighted (and is unlocked), remains, until you remove focus from it. in 0.9.4.0 ALL unlocked items were removed. now, only locked items and the currently focused item seem to remain.

i hope i have explained this well enough. if you have any questions, please email me.

New version is much nicer. However, I have one comment. I saw the screen flickering more when changing from one item to another one in the datagrid. It is a little annoying problem.

SharpReader 0.9.5.1

Hi,
I just happened to stumble across SharpReader today, and was very excited to see it. I hadn't known anything about RSS before, and am very happy that it exists. I've noticed one thing though. I often visit www.slickdeals.net. It says it has an RSS feed, which it does, but when one of the entries in the feed is opened in SharpReader the Microsoft Development Environment comes up saying that the program needs to be debugged.

Again, great product, thanks a lot.

Gregg

Thanks for the new version. I'll tell you tomorrow if the thread feeds lock up or keep going.

I've tuned my article retention and so improved the performance, even before installing this build, so I can't really confirm how much better it is.

One bug that's still there: when you click on the + in the ListView that expands to show the references and/or comments, and that expansion causes the list to scroll, a lassoo selection is started, without the mouse button being down.

I also have the non-defined character in the ordered column, but that's because I use Verdana, which I'd prefer to continue to use because it has the best hight:width ratio.

Luke,

I've been having a problem that may affect others.
When trying to subscribe to a new feed, the feed item doesn't get the feed's title, but rather its address.
Is this a problem only for me?

Cheers,
Omer

A nice feature would be a RefreshAll button beside the Refresh & Subscribe buttons. It's an extra click to always have to click on Subscribed Feeds and then on Refresh.

Nice software -- I recommend it to my colleagues.

Small bug report: Subscribed feeds cannot be dropped into the last position, either on the main list or in a category. Perhaps for the next release you could add a Sort Feeds By option? I keep them in alphabetical order.

bill, if you right-click on a feed, there is an option to "Sort By Name". If you're inside of a category, it will only sort the feeds in that category.

Threw together a quick text file listing of SharpReader keyboard commands (for those of us who like "cheat sheets"). It's just plain text so you can format it however you like. Grab it here: http://michael.kizer.ws/2004/07/sharpreader-keyboard-commands.html

Congratulations on writing the first RSS reader I haven't thrown out after three days. It has one of the fastest sync rates I've seen, and plenty of good things about it's interface. That said, the rest of this is bitching (of the good mannered variety).

• Drag and drop behaviour for the left hand bar is inconsistent, both with itself and with the behaviour of similar setups. Dropping a feed on a folder should put it in the folder all the time, rather then putting it above it if the folder has anything in it.
• Digest authentication is broken; I get just get repeated challenges, with a username and password I've verified work. This means that there's no way to read friend's only posts on LiveJournal, or similar password protected schemes.
• Browser integration is heavily in favor of Internet Explorer; understandable, using .NET, but frustrating to those who use Mozilla (or others). In particular, there's no way to prevent opening a link from overloading an open browser window.
• It would also be nice if the integrated browser could be chosen. I dislike having IE code run on my machine for any reason. I realize this may be much harder than solving the previous problem.

Please let me know if I can clarify, or help, in any way. I haven't programmed in .NET, but I'm a quick learner.

New version of SharpReader
Now it keeps your list view from session to session. Which means all my folders stay closed!!! SharpReader 0.9.5.1 is now available at sharpreader.net. Changes since the last version are: Fixed a NullReferenceException that would sometimes occur upon c...

Following up my earlier comment: Yes, the feed threads still get stuck over time, but it seems there's now alway one thread available to action user requests, like obtaining comments and manual refreshes.

Just installed the latest version... congratulations on making a great product even better!! The flagging feature is most welcome, especially as I use SharpReader for my work and often reference posts after several days.

Uh oh, with v.0.9.5.1, SR does not remember the window state (max vs. normal) between uses. At least on my machine with XP...

Great program! The best there is and is almost perfect.

In addition to what Bill said the previous version(0.9.4) the tool tip for the feeds showed read/unread entries which seems to be removed from this version. It was a nice feature to have... Maybe it impacted on the overall performance; otherwise it would be good to have the feature back.

I'm observing a great improvement in performance of this version over the previous one. Congrats again for making this great piece of freeware.

Really liking the speed improvements, #R refreshes my feeds sooo much faster than the other readers I've tried. Also, the flagging feature is very handy indeed.

BTW, I've updated my list of #R keyboard commands to include a couple that Luke pointed out to me. Plus, I created a nicely formatted MS Word 2000 and an Adobe PDF version too.
Enjoy...
http://michael.kizer.ws/2004/07/sharpreader-keyboard-commands.html

The new version is awesome, I love SharpReader, etc etc etc. Okay, enough of the buttering up; here the feature request:

I'd like to see a "pause" option when you right click the taskbar icon. This option would pause popup notifications and possibly stop reading feeds until sharpreader was "unpaused". The taskbar icon would probably need to turn a different color.

Useful for meetings, presentations, and when one needed to get some work done without interruptions.

And seriously, Sharpreader rocks my world.

Hey, I just found your SharpReader, it's very good for testing my feed script because I it's simple and small, easy to use. But I have a problem: I removed all items from my feed and want to refresh the view, because my script gave me too many items. Now I don't see any item. The feed is just empty. I removed the cache folder, to no success. What can I do now? Is there no easy way to make SharpReader *always* read *all* items and show them correctly? A way to remove all items would be OK, too. Please contact me via mail, I couldn't find your mail address here.

Firstly, I'd like to say that I agree with *everyone* that this is the best RSS reader I've seen. Up until now I've just kept a list of web addresses to visit regularly because I couldn't find a reader that I liked. This one does the trick.

There are a couple of things that could be better though, most have been mentioned above. The main problem I have is with the tree view not working similarly to other similar applications. I'd like dropping a feed into a folder to actually put it in that folder all the time instead of sometimes putting it above it, and also for "Sort By Name" to put folders at the top in alphabetical order followed by everything else in alphabetical order, similar to how Windows Menu's are "Sort By Name"'d.

And finally, I leave my computer on 24/7, and I'm leaving #R on 24/7 too. This afternoon when I came home, #R was using almost 100% cpu utilisation even though it didn't appear to be doing anything at the time. Any idea why? I'm using .NET 1.1 (1.0 also installed) with XP Pro. I have Folding @ Home installed which should be using all available CPU at all times but it hadn't done anything since I left this morning though it usually ticks over fairly quickly when I'm not here. So it seems #R had been using most of the CPU time for several hours.

Anyway, despite a couple of little niggles, it's a great program overall and I'll be continueing to use it and look forward to future versions.

Thanks

Have you tested it with the Task Switcher Power Toy?

Why does Sharpreader create "child" tree items of the post for some hyperlinks, and not others? For example, this post has two hyperlinks, but only the second appears as a child in the tree view...

Another feature request: Add an option to have trackbacks in (subscribed?) comment feeds open in the SR browser window instead of in a separate window.

Thanks again.

Hi Luke,
SharpReader is getting near perfection with every new version.
I found this info at "http://wesnerm.blogs.com/net_undocumented/2004/09/net_vs_native_p.html" while going through the Blogdgger search feed on the term 'sharpreader':
----------------------------------------------------------
I don't think that .NET applications necessarily perform worse than native applications. On the other hand, even in idle, WinForms applications are clearly doing a lot more work than their native cousins, constructing numerous kinds of window events such as the MouseMove, MouseEnter, and Idle event. These idle costs are still fairly small, as temporary objects are essentially free in .NET.

Performance is primarily affected by the algorithms and data structures used by the programs. Heap-based objects are definitely slower stack-based objects, but not by much in the .NET world. Some at Microsoft actually believe that performance potentially can be faster in .NET applications, because dynamically compiled code can offers computer-specific optimizations and eliminates indirections to addresses known only at runtime, and GC-based heap allocations can approach the performance of stack allocations.

I use SHARPREADER regularly and am aware of its performance issues. When it performed poorly a few times, I examined it under the Performance Monitor microscope and discovered that garbage collector was hardly operating at all.

When I imported a large OPML file, (normally a lengthy operation, so it doesn't qualify as a performance problem) I did noticed that SHARPREADER was allocating over 30 million objects per second, yet only spending 3% of its time in the garbage collector--a good demonstration of how efficient the GC is at reclaiming temporary objects.

Some of the real performance issues can be attributed to the simple fact that SHARPREADER runs in DEBUG mode. Also, FurryGoat had a post (since removed), in which he looked at SharpReader through the CLRProfiler and determined that XML serialization was probably a major cause.

As for SHARPREADER's large memory consumption, I discovered using the CLR Profiler that the primary culprit is large amount of strings allocated (28MB for 34401 strings--72% of all memory allocated), mostly inside an object called Model.RSSItem. He could instantly reduce memory consumption by half by storing the strings through Huffman compression or just by simply using byte arrays encoded as UTF8. This is not a native versus .NET issue.

I haven't previously noticed any performance issues with RSS Bandit; on the other hand, I haven't used RSS Bandit on a regular basis. A quick Google search reveals some gripes with performance, which either still persists and I haven't seen it, or have been fixed with regular updates. Just simple fixes can remove performance bottlenecks. It seems after each new version of SHARPREADER, Luke discovers another fix that improves performance by 25%.

The working set for SHARPREADER is 30Mb, FeedDemon is 23 Mb, and RSS Bandit is 4 Mb in their initial configuration on my machine. (In comparison, the working set for MS Word and MS Excel are about 18 Mbs.) So, actually in their bare configuration, RSS Bandit is the tightest of them all, even considering that RSS Bandit also uses the .NET runtime. However, the working set of .NET applications have a significantly high variance than native applications. While RSS Bandit was idle, I watch the working set figures initially progress to to 13 MBs, then in an instant fall down into 6.5MB, as it appears a collection has occurred. The working set oscillated in a narrowing range (down to a range between

Hi Luke,
SharpReader is getting near perfection with every new version.
I found this info while going through the Blogdgger search feed on the term 'sharpreader':

Some of the real performance issues can be attributed to the simple fact that SHARPREADER runs in DEBUG mode. Also, FurryGoat had a post (since removed), in which he looked at SharpReader through the CLRProfiler and determined that XML serialization was probably a major cause.

As for SHARPREADER's large memory consumption, I discovered using the CLR Profiler that the primary culprit is large amount of strings allocated (28MB for 34401 strings--72% of all memory allocated), mostly inside an object called Model.RSSItem. He could instantly reduce memory consumption by half by storing the strings through Huffman compression or just by simply using byte arrays encoded as UTF8. This is not a native versus .NET issue.

I haven't previously noticed any performance issues with RSS Bandit; on the other hand, I haven't used RSS Bandit on a regular basis. A quick Google search reveals some gripes with performance, which either still persists and I haven't seen it, or have been fixed with regular updates. Just simple fixes can remove performance bottlenecks. It seems after each new version of SHARPREADER, Luke discovers another fix that improves performance by 25%.

The working set for SHARPREADER is 30Mb, FeedDemon is 23 Mb, and RSS Bandit is 4 Mb in their initial configuration on my machine. (In comparison, the working set for MS Word and MS Excel are about 18 Mbs.) So, actually in their bare configuration, RSS Bandit is the tightest of them all, even considering that RSS Bandit also uses the .NET runtime. However, the working set of .NET applications have a significantly high variance than native applications. While RSS Bandit was idle, I watch the working set figures initially progress to to 13 MBs, then in an instant fall down into 6.5MB, as it appears a collection has occurred. The working set oscillated in a narrowing range (down to a range between **************************************
I don't know much about programming... Just thought it'ld be great if this is of any help in developing the next release of Sharpreader.

One more thing; the tooltip for feeds in previous versions used to show the (read/unread) number along with the title of the feed. However in the present version(0.9.5.1) it only shows the feed title. It'ld be great if the old feature is brought back in the next version.

Thanks again for making such a wonderful program. Best wishes.

I'm french and i like use SharpReader because it's better than every french tools that I know :o|

I'm volunteer to translate SharpReader in french, and/or give tech-help about multi-languages framework of my VB6 projects (as Yahoo! Messenger Plus)

I hope you do it soon ;o)

Win2k

I love Sharpreader - but - I am having a window drawing problem with the new version.

In the top right hand window section - the news item listing section - if I use the scroll wheel on my mouse (which functions fine with every other app that I use) the division between the listing section window and the browser section window disappears and when I browse a news item by double clicking on it...the top inch of the web page is not visible. Also the border is not draggable... unless I restart Sharpreader.

Immediately this happens I have to restart....

Is this a known problem ??

Regards,

Howard
Ireland

Hi Luke

sorry for bothering u

I am ur sharpreader user and I am chinese , so sorry for my poor English

I have a question to ask u about SharpReader ,

coz I use ur progarm in my company , but if we guys want to access Internet

we must go through by the Proxy Server .

When I launch IE , it will ask me about USER_ID , Password , and Domain Name

after inpun the above information then I can browse the WWW

But when I want to use SharpReader , i can't access any RSS site .

Then I check the SharpReader=>Tools=>Options=>Proxy

it only has UserNAme and Password , there is no domain to input ,

oh btw I also try to input domain\Username in UserNAme :

but it didn't works .

So sorry to bother u to ask this question ? is there any other way to use ur program .

Thanks .

Best Regards

Guess

Great reader!

1. When you have your gmail account in the rss reader you have to type username and password over and over - is a fix for this on your todo list?
2. It would be cool if I could export all my locked items (not just the url) into a file.

Hakon

It has already been noted, but I cannot put more than one subscribed feed into a category folder, making it difficult to organize my feeds. I love the simple interface with the browser like Address window. The popup notices are nice.

To add more than one subscription in a category, drop them on a feed already in that category. The only exception to this is when the category is still empty as there's nothing yet to drop it on at that time.