I found an application that'll tell you if you have new Google Reader items. Except... it didn't work. It didn't tell about unread items, ir if it failed to connect, or whatever. Just enter your username and password, and wait.. for what? no feedback.

Well, I decided to fix it. Being open source and all, I have access to the code, so, why not?
Since it's written in C#, which I never ever used, it took me a little time, but in the end I found the problem: The login checker always returned false. Bad check. I replaced it. Now it works (for me).
But before that, there was another problem. The last revision (r17) in trunk was broken. or at least missing some references. Anyway, it didn't compile. So I used earlier revision (r12), which was still newer than the "official relese" (1.0.5), and worked from there. So now I have a working program that also have some extra functionality over official release: 'start with windows' option and login validity check in preferences.

Anyway, I decided to make my changes available, in case somebody's interested.
Note that it'll probably need dot.net framework 3.5, unlike the original project, which needed dot.net 1.1 .

I used Feed Validator to check my appEngine RSS feed, and fixed all validating problem. It wasn't easy.
One problem was that dates need to be in RFC-822 Format. Another problem was the Email address which should include real name : "yonizaf@yonizaf.com (yoni zaf) ".
The last problem was guid. It's a tag that has to be unique for each item, but also be a valid URL unless stated otherwise. I ended up using the timestamp for that. oh well.

Checking around, there aren't many feeds that validate. Even FeedBurner made an error: while using ?format=xml they didn't include it in the Self reference, resulting in a validation error.