Random .NET Ramblings

The West Region Visual Studio sales team and Neudesic are hosting 6 events where customers are invited to come see how Visual Studio Team System and Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 can be used to implement the Agile method known as "Scrum".

8/26/2008 - Mountain View, CA Register

8/28/2008 - Phoenix, AZ Register

9/9/2008 - Irvine, CA Register

9/10/2008 - Los Angeles, CA Register

9/23/2008 - Denver, CO Register

9/25/2008 - Salt Lake City, UT Register

Check out Mojave here!

If you did not know Microsoft is currently working on Internet Explorer 8 (IE8), you may ask why a new web browser? If you are not a flower of the “browser wars” you may not realize that over the years all browser have made compromises in how they parse HTML and associated style sheets. This was done for appropriate reasons by all for the time they were created, this helped the browsers render existing content on the web but over the years as web developers have adopted new standers browsers needed to adapt and while Internet Explorer 7 did a lot it was not completely standards compliant so the goal for IE8 is to make the “Standards mode” much better than IE7 but also keep the IE7 standards available in IE8 so we are left with three layout modes – Quirks, IE7 Standards, and IE8 Standards. You can tell IE8 to use the IE7 Standards mode by adding a meta tag ‘<META http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7">’ but you should start to update your sites content to comply with the CSS 2.1 standard to the IE8 Standards will render your site well.

For more information about layout modes, standards in IE8 go to the blog posts from the IE8 team The Default Layout Mode, Microsoft's Interoperability Principles and IE8 and HTML and DOM Standards Compliance in IE8 Beta 1. If you are interested in one of the milestones the team reached before the release of beta 1 check out the blog post Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone.

Security

The largest issue for customers is around security, I don’t know about you but as the family tech support I want my mother-in-laws web experience to be as secure as possible so I keep turning off her Linksys router :). That has only frustrated her so I look forward to all the security enhancements IE8 will bring to her (no I have not installed beta 1 for her but I will most likely install beta 2) my personal favorite observable feature is Domain Highlighting in the address bar. Now when you get send that email asking you to change your online banks account password you will see the domain name of the site you are accessing in black text while the rest of the site address will appear in gray like:

  vs.

The hope would be that my mother-in-law will see on the real site the domain name looks like it should where the other page dose not look like it is part of the wellsfargo domain. It gets better when you go to a site that has been reported to Microsoft as a phishing website you will the address bar look like this:

  for more on the Microsoft Safety Filter go to the faq on it.

If domains use Extended Validation SSL certificates IE8 will show a green background and the company name the SSL cert. is registered to.

There are a lot of other security features in IE8, the team has a (so far) 5 part series about all security in IE8:

IE8 Security Part I: DEP/NX Memory Protection
IE8 Security Part II: ActiveX Improvements
IE8 Security Part III: SmartScreen® Filter
IE8 Security Part IV: The XSS Filter
IE8 Security Part V: Comprehensive Protection

While the security features are great there is still only so much any single software application can do to stop people from doing things that can hurt there system so still remember surf intelligently!

New Ways to experience the web

Part IE8 is extending the web user experience to do this IE8 includes two new ways to interact with the web beyond the page with Activities and WebSlices

I have written about Activities in the post IE8 Activity: "Define with Wikipedia" but basics are (from IE8 Features page) “Activities are contextual services that provide quick access to external services from any webpage” I think this a great way to let users with information on any web page regardless how site designers expect.

WebSlices are equally interesting for designers to anticipate what information users will want to be aware of. again from the IE8 Features page:

“Web sites can expose portions of their page as a WebSlice, which users can subscribe to. And users can bring that content with them on their links bar wherever they are on the web. Users receive update notifications when the content changes.”

I will do a future post about how to implement WebSlices.

Status and Future

The current release of IE8 is Beta 1 witch is targeted for web developers and designers to so they can prepare for the release of IE8. I have been running the current beta for months now and I have had little problems, I run it in IE7 Emulation mode most of the time.

Bill Gates at TechEd this last June announced that Beta 2 will be (read should be) released in August of this year. I have not been keeping up with the internal builds so I don’t know how on track the team is with that date.

Back in the day Microsoft created a code base to be used to help people learn .NET programming. The format was a cool game called Terrarium, the concept was that using .NET code you would build creatures of different types. You had to build each creature within a range of specifications if your animal met the specifications you could put in in to the Terrarium environment and see how it manages with the goal that your creatures take over the Terrarium.

I used the original Terrarium as a way for my students at UCSD to get some real world experience with .NET. I found that a lot of students really got in to the game and enjoyed creating creatures. I never created a successful creature my self but I think I may give it another try this time around.

If you want to learn .NET or know someone who dose you might point them to the new version on CodePlex. The URL is http://www.codeplex.com/terrarium2, just don’t get too sucked in to it! :)

I have been given a new opportunity at Microsoft, for the last three years I have had the position of Developer Evangelist. In that role, I have had the opportunity to work with all the Microsoft focused user groups in Southern California. This has allowed me to work with some of the most local, community-focused people I have had the privilege to know. This was a perfect fit for me as I had been active in running user groups for almost 20 years. As a Developer Evangelist, I also was able to represent Microsoft at events where the attendees were not always the most positive (and often quite hostile) about Microsoft. This included events like JavaOne, OSCON, various BarCamps and many other. I enjoyed each of these engagements, and while I hope I encouraged Microsoft sceptics to have a more open mind to Microsoft, I know that I learned a lot about the startups, entrepreneurs & angel\venture investors. In the past, I have started a product company, two service companies and worked at a product startup but I had never needed to or been able to get involved into the angel\venture investor side of being in a startup. This made the last few years quite interesting and educational.

With the new job I have moved into the Western Region Developer Platform & Evangelism Strategy Team where I will be managed by the only person that objected to me being hired at Microsoft, but I think he is over it now :). The new position will let me work full time with startups, entrepreneurs & investors. I will get to help startups implement or integrate with Microsoft products and services. Once I do what I do, others on my new team will work with the startups to create white papers and case studies that will be used to help produce PR for the startups as well as Microsoft. I don’t know all of the details of my new position, I have a team meeting next week where I will learn more about the job, but I am looking forward to this new opportunity.

The only bummer is that now I will not get to go to Hawaii a few times a year.