:MsHelp

Since yesterday Microsoft has released pubCenter as a beta to the public. pubCenter is an ad publishing tools that lets you place contextual advertisements on your sites. It was already being used, but only for a select group of testers. Now that Microsoft has released it to the public it is looking for more participants to place advertisements on their site. You can compare pubCenter to Google AdSense which is Google’s way of placing adverts on your personal site.

If you are interested in the program and you are a resident of the US (because for the time being the beta is restricted to US residents only) you can sign up for free on Microsoft’s avertising link.

More information about pubCenter can be found on pubCenter’s blog

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As you may or may not know since the release of ASP.NET MVC RTW 1.0 Microsoft has placed reference pages on MSDN library. Here can find all the information concerning the different methods, properties, classes etc that you can use. Following namespaces are thoroughly explained:

- System.Web.Mvcnamespace

Contains classes and interfaces that support the MVC pattern for ASP.NET Web applications. This namespace includes classes that represent controllers, controller factories, action results, views, partial views, ad model binders.

- System.Web.Mvc.Ajaxnamespace

Contains classes that support AJAX scripts in an ASP.NET MVC application. The namespace includes support for AJAX scripts and AJAX option settings.

- System.Web.Mvc.Htmlnamespace

Contains classes that help render HTML controls in an MVC application. The namespace includes classes that support forms, input controls, links, partial views, and validation.

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I’m a big movie fan and own a lot of movies. To keep track of them all I manage a small access database file. This is ok but some more details on the movie would be great. So if I want to find some more information on a specific movie, I visis www.imdb.com , which probably is one the best knows movie sites out there.

The problem with IMDB however is that there is no API or webservice that you can talk too. Like Amazon.com for example does have, http://aws.amazon.com/. So I opened google and started looking for some way of querying IMDB. If you google you get a lot of results of people who have created something.

There was one interesting open source project which caught my eye and this is, Imdb services on codeplex.

I though wow this looks good, let’s take a look at the code.

In the vb.net project you’ll see a class that screen scrapes the IMDB result and using regular expressions selects the different parts of data and places it in different classes. A really clever way of getting data from somewhere. The problem I see here though is that sites like IMDB tend to do updates to there HTML code. When something like that would happen, this project will throw errors. But for now, really nice project and if you want to create a slick winforms application to browse through your movies, you can use this project to get some more details.

For the long run, please IMDB, put some effort in creating a webservice that we can use to query and retrieve movie information. You would make a lot of people very happy I think.

Sven

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