Startup with DotNetKicks.com
June 15th, 2007One of the nice little features of Visual Studio is the list of headlines that comes up on the startup screen. It uses an RSS feed from MSDN by default but you can set it to something else, such as DotNetKicks.com. Specifically, you want to enter the URL for the RSS feed:
http://www.dotnetkicks.com/feeds/rss
Simply open your Options from the Tools menu and select the Startup node. The screenshot below shows how it looks on my system.
And once you have the headlines coming in from DotNetKicks.com you will want to help make it better by contributing new kicks from your favorite blogs. Here are a few suggestions:
- Scott Guthrie (Senior MS Developer)
- Nikhil Kothari (Senior MS Developer)
- Scott Hanselman (Senior .NET Developer)
- Omar AL Zabir (PageFlakes creator)
- Rob Conery (SubSonic creator)
- Phil Haack
- Ayende @ Rahien (NHibernate)
- Ted Neward (It's Ted... you know, Ted.)
- Steve C. Orr
- help.net
- John Resig (Javascript expert)
While I look at DotNetKicks.com for the occasional reading material I also use a blog aggregator to group many blogs together into a central point. I was using Rojo.com which has been plagued with instability so I have switched over to Google Reader which has been working great. I just wish there was more going on with DotNetKicks.com, so go read and kick those blogs!
June 15th, 2007 at 10:27 am
Nice tips, thanks.
BTW, to help reduce duplicate submissions, you can replace 'www.dotnetkicks.com/submit' with 'www.dotnetkicks.com/kick' in your kick it link.
June 18th, 2007 at 8:16 pm
Awesome tip... I hate that damn startup screen because it always seems to take so long to load. Here's to hoping it was the MSDN feed servers, and not VS itself.