Changes since the last version are:

• Run internal browser in restricted security zone in order to make IE responsible for blocking restricted content, instead of just doing so by parsing and stripping tags.
• Allow embedded CSS styles in item descriptions (was previously disabled because of javascript exploits that are now caught because of the security zone).
• Support both <commentRSS> as well as <commentRss> as there was some confusion as to the proper capitalization of this element.
• Fixed linebreak handling for some feeds.
• Improved handling of relative urls in atom feeds (like Sam Ruby's feed for instance).
• Now displaying enclosure links at the bottom of the item description.
• Fixed installer to no longer complain if only .NET 2.0 is installed.

Oh, and Luke? Pretty nice showing for a one-person unpaid hobby aggregator, mate

Thanks Phil :-)

I'm actually not that surprised SharpReader managed to get all these tests right; what does surprise me is that 9 out of 11 aggregators don't...

I agree with Nick, who commented "This is the right thing to do, and I'm glad you're doing it - thanks". I'd like to add some emphasis to that statement though: "This is the right thing to do, and I'm glad you're doing it - thanks".

See, neither Nick's aggregator nor mine requires well-formed XML. This is because there are a lot of non-well-formed feeds out there, and the typical aggregator user doesn't care about XML specs, they just want to see the feed content. And if you're requiring well-formed XML, something as small as a single "&" in a single post will invalidate the entire feed, for as long as that post remains in the feed (which can be weeks depending on the update frequency of the feed).

Microsoft being more strict than us has the following positive results though:

• It will most likely reduce the number of invalid feeds out there, making it easier for everyone to parse feeds.
• Microsoft gets positive press for "doing the right thing".
• For those feeds that still break, it may be another reason for people to look for alternative aggregators that can read that feed they're interested in.

Also, if anyone has any positive experiences with hosting a 50+ Gb/month site at a reasonable price (I currently only pay $17/month), please let me know. This wasn't the first outage I've had, nor do I expect it to be the last. Maybe it's time to move on.

update: looks like my hosting company still has some issues to be worked out; I can't send any emails through outlook for getting some weird "503 valid RCPT command must precede DATA" error (though sending through the web-based interface seems to work fine), and for some reason my movable type install is not showing any of your comments. Comments have not been lost though, as I can see them through the MT admin interface, and am also getting the email notifications (i'm actually getting those twice now... weird) - I just need to figure out why it's not rebuilding the pages correctly...

update 2: email issue has been fixed - for some reason I had to use some outlook setting that wasn't needed before their servers crashed... now all I need is to figure out what's going on with MT...

update 3: turned out that all comments were in a pending status and needed to be manually approved (the email notifications conveniently failed to mention this though). My MT-Blacklist was setup to only force moderation on old posts, but since the crash-recovery it now seems to force it on new ones as well. Oh well - I'm long overdue for an upgrade to MT 3.2 + SpamLookup anyway; guess it's time to stop procrastinating (but not tonight).

Changes since the last version are:

• Support for Atom 1.0.
• Listening on port 5335 is now done on localhost only. This should prevent your firewall from showing this alert message.
• You can now change the url of a feed through the feed properties pane.
• If your subscriptions.xml file got corrupted somehow, sharpreader now reads the previous version upon startup (this would previously crash SharpReader on startup).
• Fixed "The server committed an HTTP protocol violation." errors that are often thrown by wordpress feeds because of an invalid header. SharpReader now ignores these bad headers instead of throwing an exception.
• Fixed a bug in the feed-discovery code.
• Improved http redirect handling.
• Uninstaller now asks whether to remove all settings and cache files.