Expert Texture
The blogged wandering of Robert W. Anderson
March 7, 2008 at 12:20 pm · Filed under .NET
A little late, but here are my notes on the Steve Ballmer keynote at MIX08.
The Q & A format was certainly better than having Steve Ballmer just talk for an hour, though I got a little tired of Guy Kawasaki’s cracks at Ballmer — about his wealth and method of travel, how Microsoft “should have hired” him. It got better when he stopped that.
I thought the best questions were from the Audience:
On .NET being baked into IE
Why isn’t IE built on .NET.
This has been a common theme, that is, the lack of .NET adoption for some major Microsoft products. Part of that is dog-fooding, but a bigger part is that the developer stories for these products are harder for lack of deep .NET support. For example, Office and IE are not based on .NET. Connecting between their unmanaged, COM, BHO worlds and the managed .NET world is more than a little painful.
Anyway, his response was that .NET wasn’t expected to be as proven and as far along by the time Vista shipped. Fair enough, but I would have been happier if the delays in Vista were related to a real WinFx in the OS than the reasons given.
The iPhone
What about Silverlight for the iPhone?
Steve Ballmer responded (paraphrased) . . .
Would love to get it on everything;
Can’t say we’ve been having talks about it; and
Licensing model not so good.
Right. The licensing model is not so good.
Maybe Microsoft can pay Apple a bunch of money so Silverlight can run on the iPhone. Then developers can build the apps for free?
Sounds good to me.
Tags: .NET, IE, IE8, iPhone, Longhorn, Microsoft, Silverlight, Vista
March 5, 2008 at 11:22 am · Filed under .NET
This is the second of three posts on the MIX08 keynotes. This is like live blogging without the live, since I’m writing this in Oakland. You can follow my comments at http://twitter.com/rwandering.
IE8, Dean Hachamovitch, GM IE
Focus on standards compliance. This will be a great productivity boost for web-site developers.
1. CSS 2.1.
2. CSS cert.
- Funny that Microsoft is claiming that ambiguities in the specs make it hard to prove correctness. They are correct, but it sounds a little like whining. It also reminds me of the Server 2008 test.
- Test cases from Microsoft, good.
- IE 8 transition might be painful. For users.
3. Performance.
4. HTML 5.
- Back button can work with AJAX. This is a very big deal for improving the consistency of the browser user experience.
- Connection events in HTML 5 / DOM storage, re-connect, “make content available” later. Cool.
5. new dev tools
- Cool script debugger in IE8. Looks like the developer toolbar has gotten much better.
6. Activities
- User activities added to browser by users (kind of like smart links).
- Activities are defined in XML. Kind of cool, though I can see the browser becoming hard to use as a user adds a bunch of activities; however, that is up to them to manage.
- This format is the OpenService Format Specification. Share/Share-alike spec.
7. WebSlices
- Users can subscribe to parts of web-pages (driven by sites providing this as a service).
- This is the WebSlice Format Specification. Public domain spec.
8. IE8, Beta 1 for developers
- Released today. Cool. I will be checking this out. At first in a VM. I hope IE7 can live along side IE8. Since they didn’t mention this, my guess is no.
Tags: IE, IE7, IE8, Microsoft, MIX08, Silverlight
October 25, 2006 at 12:29 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
Last week I wrote in Bug in IE7? that I thought there was a problem viewing this site:
In Firefox and IE6, my horizontal list (menu) works correctly. The picture below shows the “Link Blog” item highlighted and mouse-over.
In IE7, all of the text is crowded together, but the mouse-over regions are in the correct place. Again, the picture below shows in the “Link Blog” item highlighted. Noticed that the highlight is in the same place, but the text is all crowded to the left.
This alone looks like a bug. I don’t see how the text and the highlight can be in two different locations.
It turns out that this is related to the zoom feature. This site looks fine if zoom isn’t used (i.e., at 100%). More or less zoom crowds just the text, but not the mouse-overs.
Must be a bug.
Tags: CSS, Firefox, IE, IE6, IE7, IE7-Bug
October 19, 2006 at 5:52 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
Before I report this as a bug, I thought I’d write it up and see if any CSS gurus can help me.
In Firefox and IE6, my horizontal list (menu) works correctly. The picture below shows the “Link Blog” item highlighted and mouse-over.
In IE7, all of the text is crowded together, but the mouse-over regions are in the correct place. Again, the picture below shows in the “Link Blog” item highlighted. Noticed that the highlight is in the same place, but the text is all crowded to the left.
This alone looks like a bug. I don’t see how the text and the highlight can be in two different locations.
I have run this through the CSS Validator (here) and the XHTML Validator (here) and sounds nothing I can pin this on. (Note the XHTML Validator reports several errors having to do with individual posts).
So, is this a problem in my site or a bug in IE7?
Tags: CSS, Firefox, IE, IE6, IE7
October 18, 2006 at 6:20 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
There seems to be much interest in the release — I’m getting a lot of people coming to this blog for the answer.
I don’t know if it is true; but, the rumor has it that today, October 18th, is the day.
Update: and it looks like the rumors were correct.
Tags: IE, IE6, IE7, Microsoft
October 12, 2006 at 11:21 am · Filed under .NET
IE7 is coming out very soon (some say any day). One thing to be aware of: if you need to keep using IE6, don’t install IE7. This isn’t just an issue in the IE7 installer (i.e., IE7 upgrades IE6), but they cannot both be installed on the same machine.
I trust (and Microsoft really hopes) that this doesn’t affect users in a negative way.
My guess is that the only people who really care about the side-by-side issue are developers. Of course, IT managers will care too, but they can keep IE7 from being auto-updated.
My guess is that this due to COM (because IE programmability is all through COM).
Side-by-side COM is anywhere from hard to impossible. One more benefit for a browser built on managed.
Tags: .NET, IE, IE6, IE7, Microsoft
October 7, 2006 at 7:03 am · Filed under .NET
It appears that IE7 has been decoupled from Vista. According to the IEBlog, the final release will be in “a few weeks”.
On a couple of occasions, I have requested that IE7 and .NET 3.0 be released when ready (post here) — presumably before Vista. I guess I have gotten part of my wish, though it is really the RTM of .NET 3.0 that I would like to see released.
On a side note: the last I checked IE7 is not dependent on .NET. Unfortunate to say the least. I would like to see managed Browser Helper Objects (BHOs) being easy without requiring COM — that could have gotten IE7 much closer to the Firefox extension model. What will ever drive .NET installs onto XP so that it is, in fact, ubiquitous?
Tags: .NET, .NET3.0, Firefox, IE, IE7, Vista, WinFx
April 26, 2006 at 10:41 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
Nick Bradbury has an excellent post on how Dvorak is wrong about Internet Explorer (perhaps Dvorak is reading Kevin Burton’s blog).
I agree with Mr. Bradbury on the value that Microsoft brings to developers by making IE easily embeddable into applications. Having this capability built into the OS makes it all the easier for the distribution of new products without the weight of an IE install.
So, yes, I too am glad that Windows has a browser. I do wish it were better and easier to extend; but, I think IE7 will help us there too.
Tags: Dvorak, IE, IE7, Windows
March 25, 2006 at 10:18 am · Filed under Miscellaneous, Web 2.0
Kevin Burton suggests that the Vista IE7 delay can be eliminated by tossing IE7 and adopting Firefox. I would be surprised if IE7 is on the Vista critical path, but the idea of Microsoft replacing IE7 made me laugh.
At first, I thought he was kidding, but he is serious (see the discussion between Robert Scoble and Kevin in the comments for that post). Fundamentally, Kevin’s idea is an interesting one, but that ship sailed a long time ago. Too many developers have products that rely on IE (e.g., NewsGator uses the IE browser control) with large installed user bases. Microsoft cannot just leave those developers and users in the lurch without a migration path.
Kevin suggests that since Firefox is a whole new application, that existing applications wouldn’t break. Good point, but remember, IE6 is considered a security problem. Abandoning IE7 doesn’t solve the IE6 problem for Microsoft.
They own the problem by winning the first Browser Wars and then letting IE stagnate.
Tags: Browser-Wars, Firefox, IE, IE6, IE7, Vista
February 4, 2006 at 2:43 pm · Filed under .NET, Web 2.0
I have been working on the Attention recorder for IE 6/7 for the AttentionTrust in my “spare” time. I’m using C++/ATL for this.
I am enjoying working in C++ again (most of my development these days is in C#), but it has brought out to me my personal likes / dislikes about the two languages. I know this post is about 3 or 4 years late, but I wasn’t blogging back when I started with C#.
Things I miss in C++
- Const pointers: The ability to declare that the data referenced by a pointer will be accessed read-only is quite useful. I never liked that this isn’t supported by .NET; though, I understand why it was.
- Macros: This one still gets me. The macro support in C# is nearly non-existent. Why would you want macros? Doesn’t this violate the strong-typedness of the language? Yes, but stringizing and token-pasting is very useful to build maintainable code. I really wish C# supported this.
- copy constructors: Having a default implementation of the copy constructor is quite useful.
What I don’t miss in C++
- Header files: When I used to work in C++ I remember enjoying the distinction between the declaration and the implementation of classes and methods; however, now I just feel like it is an annoyance. The C# approach of leaving this up to the tools is much easier.
- NULL: Back when true and false were added to C++ as language elements, I wished that null had been added too.
- global scope: At first I didn’t like that C# has no global scope (outside of classes), but now I look at C++ and don’t like that I have to put methods that are clearly associated with a class implementation, but static, outside of the definition of the class. Certainly this can be handled with namespaces, but that doesn’t quite do it.
Of course, I much prefer the richness of the .NET Framework to the hodge-podge of class libraries required in C++ to do anything modern: ATL / MFC or WTL / MSXML, etc, . . . I also prefer the overall environment of garbage collection and pointer-safety delivered by a managed environment.
Tags: .NET, Attention, c#, IE, Web2.0
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