BenHollis.net

In August, 2011, a major change to how Xbox.com works broke XBList. This sort of occurrence isn't uncommon since XBList simply screenscrapes Xbox.com, leaving it vulnerable to even minor changes in how friend data is displayed on the site. The changes in August were more major, preventing me from just making a quick fix, though. I added fixing XBList to my pile of pending projects, and expected to get to it in the next few weeks. That didn't happen.

Recent changes to Xbox.com have broken XBList. This happens every time they change Xbox.com, but this time the changes are too major for a quick fix. The way XBList works hasn't aged well, and this is going to require some major changes. That combined with the fact that I don't have very much free time these days means that it'll be a while before there's a new version that works again. Sit tight, enjoy a game, and keep an eye on this blog for more news.

I've finally gotten around to doing some maintenance updates on three of my most-used bits of software (JSONView, XBList, and TopProcess), all in the last couple weeks. Now that they're all approved and live, I thought I'd summarize what's changed.

I've just uploaded a new version of XBList that fixes it after the new Xbox.com site changed everything around. Oh, the joys of writing a screen-scraping app! There's some good news though - the new Xbox.com design actually puts much more info on the friends page, so XBList needs to do a lot less work to get all its info, which means less resource usage and less network traffic.

Yesterday I updated XBList to 3.2.1. This release is mostly bugfixes - it fixes a problem where Xbox Gamer Tiles wouldn't load because xbox.com changed the format they stored pics in, and it fixes an issue where gamers who are away but in a game would show up as on the dashboard. The only new feature is that I've changed the sound that's played when your friends come online. It's now the same as the Xbox 360's notification sound, and is much less jarring than the old sound. I hope that comes as a welcome change. Grab the new version and let me know what you think.

I read today that Xbox.com had gotten a redesign. I had hoped it wouldn't impact the friends list page, which XBList uses to get its friend info, but unfortunately it had. The friends list is now split into 16-friend chunks. That meant I had some work ahead of me to make sure XBList could work with the new format. I'm pleased to announce that after only a few hours of work, XBList 3.2.0 has been released, which works just fine with the new site. I'm glad that all the refactoring work I had put into the software in the past allowed me to make a change like that without breaking anything. There is now the possibility of some slight weirdness if a friend changes status in the split-second between XBList loading one page and another, but I don't think much can be done about that.

I've been sitting on this one for a while, but it's finally time to push it out the door. XBList 3.1 doesn't have any revolutionary changes, but it's got a lot of polish and nice little fixes and features that are sure to make life better for XBList users. The most noticeable new enhancements are that I've gotten XBList to use your system default font now (this means Vista users get the lovely Segoe UI font), and the popup notifications have been transformed from Windows 95-style to Windows Vista style.

Well, I've finally gotten around to releasing a version of XBList that's good enough to call 3.0. Last year I posted a look at what I thought should be in the next XBList. The most major has been the transition to .NET 2.0. Besides the increased stability and power of the new framework and doing things “the 2.0 way”, I ended up rewriting most of XBList's innards in an effort to make it more maintainable, cleaner, faster, and more stable. That's all in there, even though you don't see it. Emblem loading, in particular, is much more robust. I also went out of my way to simplify the app and put in those little features that had been bugging me forever. For example, XBList now remembers if you've collapsed a category (like “Offline”) instead of expanding it each time. And a list refresh won't always scroll to the top like it used to.

I'm still working on XBList 3.0 (though not as much as I'd like, between work and a social life). However, I noticed today that XBList won't auto-signin to Passport anymore. Bummer. It has to do with the new live.com ID stuff. I promise this will be fixed in XBList 3.0, but in the meantime, you can just fire up Internet Explorer, log in to Xbox.com, and XBList will start working again.

So an update on how things are going with the next version of XBList. I've gotten a few questions about when I'll support the new ability to do messaging between Xbox.com and Xbox 360, and I put out a bunch of questions in my last post, talking about how much overhaul to do to XBList. Well, I'm going full in. I've already done a lot of work on it, and there's a lot to be done. I think the end result will be a cleaner, faster, prettier XBList. The bad news is that this is going to take time. The worse news is that I've gotten distracted with other projects, and other things (like Burnout Revenge, and enjoying the beautiful Northwest). It's just been hard to sit down and crack open Visual Studio these days. I do expect to have a nice new version of XBList out before too much longer, however.

Well, the new Xbox.com/Xbox Live update is out. It mostly introduces a Message Center for Xbox.com, where you can send and recieve messages just like on your Xbox. Of course, I'm already thinking about how best to integrate this into XBList, which is starting to see some strain from all the features I've added to it. Actually, it's still pretty lean, but it's more complicated now than I had ever intended.

Not 18 hours from Major Nelson's announcement of the new Xbox.com Friend List management features, I've updated XBList to take advantage of them. Now you can add friends, remove friends, confirm and reject friend requests, and all that good stuff. It's a lot easier than doing it all on the Xbox, that's for sure.