Release History

Changes in 0.9.7.0 - released August 2 2006

• 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.
• Now displaying enclosure links at the bottom of the item description.
• Fixed installer to no longer complain if only .NET 2.0 is installed.

Changes in 0.9.6.0 - released July 28 2005

• 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.

Changes in 0.9.5.1 - released July 20 2004

• Fixed a NullReferenceException that would sometimes occur upon closing the options dialog.

Changes in 0.9.5.0 - released July 19 2004

• Bugfix: filter ending with "\" previously caused an exception to be thrown.
• Autocomplete in textboxes, implemented using LaMarvin Autocomplete Tool.
• Changed the threading model to fix Threadpool issues and hangups with very large number of feeds.
• Read/unread counts in subscriptions-pane in blue (like outlook).
• Read feeds with an unknown default namespace as if their items were in a standard rss namespace.
• Bugfix: "space" on feed without any items selected previously sometimes selected two items.
• Fixed default browser detection for AvantBrowser.
• Fixed NullReferenceException in BlogSphere:441.
• Default feed properties tab added to options dialog.
• When the "unread only" filter is selected and new items come in, don't make the currently focused item disappear even when it's marked as read.
• Remember treeview expansion-state across sessions.
• Remember selected feed across sessions.
• Remember whether filter-pane was showing across settings.
• Remember whether feed-properties-pane was showing across settings.
• MouseWheel now scrolls control over which mouse is hovering, instead of the focused control.
• Fixed bug where style= attributes were sometimes not blocked. This caused a potential security issue as javascript can be embedded in style attributes.
• Flags - press Ctrl-0 thru Ctrl-9 to set or reset a flag on an item.
• Filtering on Flags and on Locked status.
• Fixed font-size bug in listview (did previously not resize correctly for large fonts).
• Added an installer (created with Inno Setup).
• New application icon, created by Troels Knak-Nielsen.
• Send via email option (ctrl+E).
• New refresh-rate option: "Never". This is for feeds that should never be refreshed (not even manually) and can be used if you want to stop refreshing a feed, but do not want to remove it yet (due to existing items you may want to keep).
• If a server responds with a 410:Gone response, the feed's refresh-rate will automatically be changed to "Never".
• Refresh-rate option "None" renamed to "Manual Only".
• "SharpReader Feed" menu item in help menu.

Changes in 0.9.4.1 - released March 7 2004

• Fixed bug preventing SharpReader to startup for some users.
• Fixed bug that was causing problems with long feed URLs like amazon.com's feeds.

Changes in 0.9.4.0 - released February 27 2004

• Basic Atom support.
• Fixed bug that lost all items in a feed if its contents contained illegal xml characters like &#x01;.
• Recovery of any previously lost items because of the above bug. These items will reappear when upgrading to this version.
• Keep item-comments when an item is read again (previously would show all comments as unread again).
• When a filter is active, highlight the search-terms in the internal browser.
• New filtering feature to show unread items only.
• Improved default browser detection.
• Fixed bug that sometimes prematurely displayed feed items as read.
• Keep whitespace in feeds to fix a bug where sometimes subsequent <a href> links were shown without any space between them. A side effect of this change is that previously read articles in an older version of SharpReader may show up as being updated when you first upgrade to 0.9.4
• Customizable alert popup timeout.
• For new users, default purge settings will be 14 days. Existing users are not affected by this change.
• Stagger downloads by adding or subtracting up to 2% from the refresh rate of a feed. This will ensure you won't have all your feeds refreshing at the same time, resulting in too many popups and too high a load on your system. (thanks for the idea Tony)

Changes in 0.9.3.2 - released November 19 2003

• Improved discovery of links between articles by fixing some minor bugs in the Regex used to find links in item-descriptions (with the help of Roy Osherove's Regulator)
• Returned to pre-0.9.3 algorithm for item comparisons - new algorithm was causing duplicate items in some feeds.
• Better memory cleanup when closing to systray.
• Improved keyboard navigation of threaded view (previously, arrow-left kept old item selected and arrow-right did not go into an expanded tree-branch)
• Fixed NullReferenceException that was thrown when right-clicking on a "retrieving comments" node.
• Fixed bug where the user would be unable to subscribe to a feed that was loaded thru a feed:// link under certain circumstances.
• Fixed SystemTray alert windows to stay in the bottom-right corner in case the user changes the screen resolution.
• Fixed bug that could cause SharpReader to stop downloading feeds altogether.

Changes in 0.9.3.1 - released November 9 2003

• Fixed a bug that could potentially delete all items in a feed upon refresh.
• Fixed a NullReferenceException.

Changes in 0.9.3 - released November 7 2003

• .NET 1.1 only. Go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com to upgrade if you currently only have .NET 1.0 installed
• Added support for HTTP Authentication (either through a username:pwd@url, or through a popup authentication dialog)
• FeedValidator.org url change
• Multi-select enabled in headline-view
• Handle feed:// protocol. Links to a feed:rss-url will automatically open in SharpReader. For example feed:www.hutteman.com/weblog/rss.xml would open my rss-feed in SharpReader.
• Updated to use log4j 1.2.0 beta 8 - this build no longer has the Win98/WinME bug
• Improved performance of opening new browser windows for users with IE as their default browser.
• Support for the <wfw:commentrss> element.
  • Comments are retrieved on demand and are cached across sessions.
  • If both <wfw:commentrss> and <slash:comments> tags are present, SharpReader changes the comment-count displayed when you delete comments, and also displays the number of unread items.
  • For items no longer in the rss-feed, a "+" is displayed after the comment-count to indicate more comments could have been added since the item disappeared from the feed.
• Fixed bug that sometimes caused an InvalidOperationException (Collection was modified) to occur.
• Save subscriptions right away when new feed is added.
• Load subscriptions.xml even if there was a problem loading settings.xml (previously you would lose all your subscriptions if this happened).
• Added feed-property to specify whether to automatically open the links belonging to an item. Property can be set to "always", "never", or "only if no description is present".
• "Copy IE Proxy Settings on SharpReader startup" option on the proxy-tab.
• Bypass proxy for local URLs
• Systray popup when new items arrive (can be disabled on a per-feed or per-category basis through the properties pane)
• Memory consumption has been reduced by approximately 25%. Startup performance has also been improved.

Changes in 0.9.2.1 - released July 29 2003

• Security feature: deactivate all on* attributes (onLoad, onMouseMove, etc.) as they could potentially call malicious scripts (thanks to Ben Hammersley for graciously providing a test-feed ;-)
• New browser-windows now always use your default browser (was previously broken if the option "Open links in external browser" was not set)
• Added support for the RSS 2.0 <author> tag.
• Fixed bug that sometimes killed SharpReader when spacebar'ing fast through a feed without descriptions.
• Fixed NullReferenceException if the feed-properties pane was enabled without any feeds selected in the subscriptions pane.
• Added browser progress-bar to indicate how far along the internal browser is with loading a page.
• Rudimentary popup blocker - don't allow popups if the internal browser does not have focus.
• If working through a proxy, change the request headers to ensure the proxy does not return a cached copy of the feed.

Changes in 0.9.2 - released July 8 2003

• Feedster integration (Search text-box in toolbar)
• Technorati integration (Popup-menu or Ctrl-T on Feed or Item)
• Generate OPML according to spec (added a <head> section)
• Added support for <source>
• Added support for <slash:comments>
• Bugfixes:
  • Closing a maximized window to the systray used to lose the form's size when restored
  • Deleting a feed did not previously update the read/unread counts of the containing category
  • Ctrl-B (BlogThis) without first selecting an item used to throw a NullReferenceException

Changes in 0.9.1.3 - released June 25 2003

• Fixed the bug that caused SharpReader to crash under Win98 & WinME.
• Bugfix - bundle partial mshtml.dll to fix startup bug from 0.9.1.2. (thanks to Simon Hodd's suggestion).
• Changed spacebar behavior to page-down the item-description in the embedded browser prior to jumping to the next unread item.
• Fixed bug in http 301 response handling to now also work with relative URLs.
• Keyboard shortcuts:
  • F5 refresh current feed (like it was prior to 0.9.1.2)
  • Shift-F5 refresh all feeds
  • F6 focus subscriptions pane
  • F7 focus item-headline pane
  • F8 focus mini-browser

Changes in 0.9.1.2 - released June 12 2003 - withdrawn due to bug at startup

• Bugfix - don't make spacebar jump to next item if browser is active.
• Added keyboard shortcuts:
  • F5 - focus subscriptions pane
  • F6 - focus feed properties pane
  • F7 - focus item-headline pane
  • F8 - focus mini-browser

Changes in 0.9.1.1 - released June 11 2003

• Bugfix - don't make spacebar jump to next item if browser is active.
• Bugfix - fixed datetime parsing bug.

Changes in 0.9.1 - released June 9 2003

• Change feed URL on 301 (moved permanently) HTTP-response.
• Window-size fix for Large Fonts.
• Feed Properties Pane (available through the feed popup-menu or ALT-Enter).
• Refresh Rate moved from toolbar to feed properties pane.
• Auto-purge: after x days or after x items.
• Better support for content-encoding of 'deflate'.
• Implement IBlogExtension and allow multiple plugins. Plugins are available through the item popup-menu or Ctrl-B. Plugin installation is still done by simply saving the plugin in the plugins directory.
• Spacebar moves to next unread item.
• Handle &apos; in xhtml:body.

Changes in 0.9.0.3 - released May 20 2003

• Minor bug-fixes in the item-threading functionality.
• Removed some debug-code that sometimes showed dialog-boxes when a key is pressed.

Changes in 0.9.0.2 - released May 14 2003

• gzip support to reduce bandwidth.
• Log-file is now saved in "<user-home>\Application Data\SharpReader" to allow SharpReader to be run by non-admins.
• Threading improvements:
  • Shows other items that use the same link/guid.
  • Shows links from the item-description that are also referenced by other items in feeds you subscribe to. This allows you to find "who else is blogging about this link?"
• Items marked in the browser to open in a separate window (<a target="_blank"> links) now also open using your default browser (these previously always opened using Internet Explorer).
• Don't try to refresh feeds if there is no internet connection (like when a laptop is disconnected).
• Mark updated items in Bold-Italic to make them stand out more than just Italic.
• Fixed unnecessary browser refresh when feed-refresh comes in.
• Date-parsing routine now supports EDT, CDT, MDT and PDT timezones.
• Auto-display linked webpage in mini-browser if no description present in feed.
• Radio subscription server now also works if more parameters are passed on the url (like when using Mark's bookmarklet).

Changes in 0.9.0.1 - released April 17 2003

• Added a "File | Open" menu-item.
• Added a "File | Subscribe" menu-item.
• Mark updated items in italics.
• Added a label before the address text box; ALT-D selects address text box.
• Fixed KeepAlive bug that sometimes kept connections open too long.
• Fixed bug in proxy authentication.
• Better retry-mechanism for failed webrequests.
• Fixed infinite post-threading.
• Fixed unnecessary ListView refresh issue.
• Added debug-statements at app-startup to find Win98/WinME problems. If you're running Win98 or WinME, please try to run SharpReader and send me the sharpreader.log file after it fails. Hopefully this will give me some more information that may help resolve this bug.
• Open links in external browser now always goes to the system default browser.
• Implemented Simon Fell's BlogThis plugin interface. If you save your plugin into a "plugins" subdirectory, SharpReader will find the plugin and make it available in the listview popup menu (shortcut ^B). Simon's last drop of Relaxer uses this plugin mechanism to post to RESTLog. Make sure you do NOT put IBlogThis itself in the plugins directory as this causes .NET to load this interface twice. Since SharpReader will use one copy of IBlogThis and your plugin another, SharpReader will not be able to find the plugin (because it will implement the wrong copy of IBlogThis)
• Fixed a bug that was keeping windows from shutting down.

Version 0.9.0.0 - released April 6 2003

Main features:

• handles all RSS versions, modules like dublin core, content:encoding, xhtml:body, etc.
• allows you to group your subscribed feeds in categories
• easily reorder your subscribed feeds through drag-and-drop
• feed-refresh settings per feed or per category
• reduces bandwidth by using HTTP Conditional GETs
• RSS Auto-discovery
• minimizes to the system-tray
• easy keyboard navigator to go the next or previous unread item
• dialog-less way of subscribing to new feeds - just drag a link from your browser into sharpreader, or enter the url into the address-bar at the top
• error-correction of some common rss-feed errors (unescaped ampersands, illegal characters, unknown entities)
• support for proxy-servers and proxy authentication
• mark items read and unread
• import and export opml
• filter items
• and last but not least, for items that include the full html description, sharpreader lets you expand a headline to view links and responses to/from other posts in other feeds. This allows you to read posts in context, and will show related posts together.