Brennan’s Blog

The other day I wrote about preparing your website for Internet Explorer 7. My favorite example of how this can be done is Gemination, which appears differently in IE6 than it does in browsers which support more modern CSS syntax, such as Firefox and IE7. And it does so using standard CSS and a little knowledge about how the older and newer browsers should behave. And in the book covering the CSS Zen Garden, it predicted that IE7 would likely display Gemination the same as Firefox, and the prediction was correct.

I have always done whatever possible to try to predict what is next so that I can "future proof" my work. While working with websites for the past several years I have safely avoided fancy, non-standard markup in favor of markup that I knew would be around years later. Some of those web pages created using HTML 3.2 standards are now outdated by XHTML 1.0 Transitional, but have continued to work all this time. They may require quirks mode, but they work. And I did it by sticking to the recommended standards.

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I was trolling the newgroups, as usual, and saw a signature that made me laugh.

John Doe
Microsoft Frontpage MVP

That is just hilarious. As you may know, the Microsoft MVP Program awards IT professionals who demonstrate certain qualities for various Microsoft technologies. I just did not consider Frontpage to be an area of mastery worthy of such praise. It is supposed to be a web design tool for use by non-technical people.

So from now on I will select from the following titles in my signature.

• Microsoft Notepad MVP
• Microsoft Calculator MVP
• Microsoft Paint MVP
• Microsoft Wordpad MVP
• Microsoft Start Menu MVP
• Microsoft Desktop Background MVP
• Microsoft Volume Control MVP

I may deserve the Volume Control title too. My sister could not get the music to play very loud on her computer until I adjusted the WAV output on her volume controls which was her problem. So I have the right skillz.

But there is one which may actually deserve a title if you can demonstrate the level of skill necessary.

• Microsoft Minefield MVP

Now I want to meet that Frontpage guy.

I am listening to Dotnet Rocks and Stephen Forte was just explaining that the whole anti-trust case against Microsoft was just to prevent Microsoft from destroying Netscape. He goes on to explain that since they were not innovating to succeed they had to litigate. I am baffled by such a statement. Let's recount a few of the critical technologies which Netscape introduced which are now critical to the online economy and the modern web application.

• Cookies (1994)
• Javascript (1995)
• SSL (1996)

The first widely used version of Internet Explorer, version 3, was released in 1996. That should put the innovation at Netscape in some context.

Netscape also included a plugin model which allowed for multimedia plugins to provide content on a website, causing the popularity of the web to expand even faster than if it did not provide such support. At the time two of Microsoft's primary products were Word and Excel, which were clones of competitors, namely WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3. And while Microsoft did what they could to produce a superior product, it is far from pure innovation.

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Internet Explorer 6 was released in 2001. Now 5 years later we are finally getting a new release with corrections for rendering bugs among other changes. I believe the fact that we have waited so long for a fresh release has been both good and bad.

It has been good since we have not had to continually adapt to a new release while attempting to cope with bugs in older versions. IE6 has become the devil we know. Those of us who have developed websites the past 5 years are intimately familiar with the quirks of IE6. You can even view a list of known bugs with suggested workarounds to help you resolve those difficult problems. This content has been collected over time based on experiments done by independent web developers. Occasionally Microsoft has helped develop workarounds with organizations like WaSP.

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It has been a long time since we have seen a new release of Internet Explorer. As I look up the history of Internet Explorer I see IE 5.5 was released in 2000 while IE 6.0 was released in 2001. Since then there have only been multiple stability and security related updates but virtually nothing to address problems with CSS compliance.

The push to deliver IE7 has driven by security concerns. When the IE team was gearing up to produce this release the web community demanded fixes for rendering bugs and the team has done their best to provide those fixes. Some attention has also been put into Javascript now that AJAX has become a very popular feature of modern websites.

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If you have been doing control development with ASP.NET 2.0 you are likely working with with the CompositeControl or the CompositeDataboundControl. And as you taught yourself to use these base classes you read a great deal from great authors like Miguel Castro and Dino Esposito.

I have personally soaked up as much as I can from these guys so that I can build powerful controls with helpful design-time support. And it has been easy to add advanced features like control designers, smart tags and editable templates. But there comes a point when what should be working, suddenly stops working. And since you have all this code supporting the design-time you cannot simply hit F5 to enter the debug mode. As yet the MSDN documentation on design-time debugging still only covers Visual Studio 2003. Some of the steps still match what you need to do with Visual Studio 2005, but it is different enough to make it difficult to figure it out. Today I finally figured it out and put together a step-by-step tutorial on how it is done.

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Today Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7, Release Candidate 1 which means the final release is not that far away. It also means that there will be only minor adjustments for the final release. I tried it out and recorded a screencast. See it for yourself.

[Internet Explorer 7, Release Candidate 1 Demo (21mb)]

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Related Links

• Internet Explorer Blog (official)
• Live.com (Microsoft's Portal)
• script.aculo.us - web 2.0 javascript

It seems to me that Microsoft has changed quite a bit the past few years. The company grew too quickly and earned a bad reputation for several years, and over the past few years have made strides in changing their ways. The phrase I often hear applied to Microsoft is "over sell and under deliver" which was due to Microsoft's marketing teams making promises that their research and development teams were unable to deliver.

It appears that the research and development teams are now wearing the pants. I have personally been quite happy with Windows Server 2003 and the .NET 2.0 framework. It is stable and modular enough for me to turn off the bits I do not want active, such as the Frontpage extensions. It is still not nearly what I want it to be, but I am seeing efforts pushing it in the right direction.

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It was the first time I have been out to the Microsoft office. If you have a chance to go, it is worth it just to see the photos on the wall.

For the topic, Chris Kabat walked through a business process with Business Activity Monitoring (BAM). I have created software to handle workflows with business logic using just the .NET Framework and custom code, but it was interesting to see the BizTalk approach. It was very graphical, yet still pretty powerful. At the end of the presentation we talked about when it would be appropriate to use this solution when a certain amount of coding with C# can achieve a similar result. In the past my clients have opted to hand code their business processes, so I was interested in what everyone had to say.

It is clear that one person can crank out of a lot of work using BAM, especially when you can have the business managers mock up the business processes in Visio. Essentially the business user can knock out the skeleton and then pass that over to the development team to fill in the details which can be deployed to the BizTalk server.

I also asked the Microsoft representative, Nick Zimmer, if he had any trial software available. He left for a moment and came back with several boxes full of goodies. The best part is the Virtual Server R2 Enterprise Edition with a free license. I have used virtualization heavily this past year, and intend to recommend it as often as I can. And when you see the licensing changes for enterprise distribution, you will be tempted to move to Virtual Server as well.

Take note that the next Wisconsin BizTalk User Group will be at the Microsoft office in Waukesha on Wednesday starting at 6:00pm. Chris Kabat will be presenting an end-to-end overview of Business Activity Monitoring from ODBA to the BAM Portal. This is a very new User Group, so be sure to spread the word!