Newsgator Online

I’ve switched my online news aggregator from Bloglines to Newsgator.  First, I wanted to try it out and compare it to Bloglines.  I like the interface better, especially in how you mark things as read.  I’ve swithched for good.  I mainly switched so that I can continue using RSS Bandit and get the benefit of syncing between it and an online news aggregator (supported in latest RSS Bandit 1.3.0.38 release)

Warning, when you export your subscription list from Bloglines in order to import into Newsgator, you’ll want to edit it and remove the high-level "Subscriptions" node, otherwise all your subscriptions will be created inside a folder called subscriptions.

C# Gotchas

I ran into my first bad encounter with C# garbage collection.  The destructor I added to my main application form wasn’t being called.  I tried forcing it with GC.Collect(), nothing.

What worked was adding IDisposable as a base class and implementing Dispose(), then adding a using{} block around my main form:

using (myMainForm = new MyMainForm()
{
.
Application.Run(myMainForm);
.
}

This seems to defeat the purpose of destructors, or at least the convenience of relying on them to do cleanup.

I don’t like the Dispose/using technique so I actually replaced it with a handler for the Form.Closing event.  Of course this only works with Form derived classes.

There may be something special about the main form preventing the destructor from being called.  I know the main form is being destroyed because it contains an object whose destructor DOES get called.

A few helpful web pages I googled in researching this anomoly:
http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=6905
http://www.ondotnet.com/pub/a/dotnet/2002/02/11/csharp_traps.html?page=1
http://www.andymcm.com/csharpfaq.htm