Random .NET Ramblings

[Cross posted with Strategy and Architecture Council blog]

Joe Shirey and I (Woody Pewitt) have recently concluded a series of Architect Councils titled The Importance of the Client. In 2 weeks and 1 day we did 10 events in 7 cities and while it is always great to meet customers working with our tools and technology due to the break neck travel involved we are happy it’s over!

We talked about what investments Microsoft as made and is making for web development including ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, AJAX Control Toolkit and ASP.NET 4.0 AJAX Preview 4 as well as the work we have done on Internet Explorer 8. We talked about the commitment Microsoft has made with IE8 as far as browser compliance. We also showed some of they ways developers can extend the IE8 shell\chrome with Accelerators, Web Slices and Search.

We had several questions about IE8 and Group Policy and the complete information about Group Policy and Internet Explorer 8 are available but I am happy to say that the developers tools can be turned off. There are many other setting that are manageable via Group Policies in IE8 checkout the Internet Explorer 8 Deployment Guide for more information on how to get IE out to your users with the settings you wan to have for your environment.

If you are interested in the slides I presented I have put them out on my SkyDrive.

Some links that may be of interest were:

• What's New in Internet Explorer 8
• SilverLight Demos
  • Hard Rock Memorabilia
  • Kelley Blue Book Perfect Car Finder: Photo Edition
  • SnapFlow
  • Local Chess
• As an example of a ClickOnce once and rich visualization of data with WPF I showed Vertigo’s Family.Show application.
• For an example of an application that extends the reach of a web site I showed Slideshare’s SlideShare Ribbon that enables interaction with Slideshare from within PowerPoint 2007.
• As examples of extending on to the mobile platform I pointed out Pandora for Windows Mobile.
• I also talked about rich mobile applications with the example of PockeTwit.

For all of you who made it to the events thanks for showing up for those who did not sorry we missed you but we hope you all can make our next set of events witch will be on line. Stay tuned to this blog for details.

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-078 - Critical: Security Update for Internet Explorer (960714)

I had noted in a past posting how IE8 can be told to render in IE7 standards mode. While I knew that you could do this at the IIS level or at the page level I had no clue how it could be done at the Apache server level. Well now I know thanks to Hanu Kommalapati who is an Architect Evangelist from Houston.

All the details are in his blog post Apache httpd configuration for IE7 standard mode rendering in IE8.

The Internet Explorer team just made IE8 Beta 2 available and as normal my buddy Tim Heuer is on top of it. He has released a new Accelerator (the new name for activities) and updated my Wikipedia Activities IE8 Beta 2 release – my TinyURL Accelerator.

I also wanted to point out the new improvements to the Developer Tools, they have got some way cool things in there but by far my favorite so far is the “Select element by Click” and Style selection of a selected element.

This allows you to modify and remove style attributes extremely easy! I can’t wait to play more with the new dev tools.

Check out the IE team blog IEBlog to read more!

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.

While at Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo I was doing a demonstration of Internet Explorer 8 Beta and showing off a new add-on type called Activities. During the demo I had a weak moment and said that it looked so easy to implement that while the bus was driving on the way to Mountain View, CA after the meeting I would implement an Activity for Wikipedia. I thought I understood what I needed to do from just looking at the Windows Live Maps sample but I wanted to make sure. So I found the current documentation Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit and the Activities white paper and gleaned the rest from the available samples. Here's what I came up with:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<openServiceDescription xmlns="http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0">
  <homepageUrl>http://en.wikipedia.org/</homepageUrl>
  <display>
    <name>Define with Wikipedia</name>
    <icon>http://en.wikipedia.org/favicon.ico</icon>
  </display>
  <activity category="Define">
    <activityAction context="selection" >
      <execute action="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search={selection}" />
    </activityAction>
  </activity>
</openServiceDescription>

I did learn that you need to use the proper capitalization for the category so that the new Activity will be grouped with the other Activities of that category in the "Manage Add-ons" dialog.

Once you have the XML file you need to install it, it turns out quite easy to do:

<button onclick="window.external.addService('http://thecodetrip.com/common/wikipedia_activity.xml')">Add Define Activity</button>

Now a button like this oneAdd Wikipedia Define Activity (yes it's live) will show up.

So how long did this take? Including a stop at Taco Bell on the way out of San Luis Obispo this took less than an hour to implement! Now that is an easy way to improve the user's experience and help drive traffic to sites.