brothercake of sitepoint.com has taken the time to outline not only how Internet Explorer fails to implement standard specifications but also that it doesn’t even implement it’s own propritary features in a consistant way. This article proves once again just how badly IE is implemented.

I’m spending most of my time these days working on SitePoint’s upcoming Ultimate JavaScript Reference, a task that I can fairly say is eating my brain.

Unlike the authors of the imminent Ultimate CSS Reference, I didn’t have any particular inclination to be nice to Internet Explorer. And I knew I was going to run into bugs and quirks, none of which would be any different in IE7, because the DOM simply wasn’t on the development radar for that version.

Even so, I’ve been nothing short of staggered at the sheer amount of chaotic brokenness evident in its implementation of even the simplest of things.

You may remember, not so long ago, that I wrote about the behavior of href attributes in Internet Explorer, and how for links they come back as qualified URIs rather than literal attribute values. But, oh man … that is so the tip of the iceberg when it comes to getAttribute() …

Read more…

When I was studying GDI+ I found it very hard to find good informative tutorials that took the time to explain what was happening as they went along.

This tutorial by Handy Chang is great for any experience level.

In this article, I will explain about GDI+ in .NET Framework. If you haven’t heard about GDI+, then GDI+ is a set of classes in .NET framework that deal with graphics. You can use GDI+ to draw custom drawing on the screen. GDI provides a layer of abstraction, hiding the differences between different video cards.

You simply need to call the Windows API function to do the specific task, and internally the GDI figures out how to get to the client’s particular video card to do whatever that you want.

Although GDI exposes a relatively high level API to developers, it is still an API that based on the old Windows API with C style functions. GDI+ sits as a layer between GDI and your application providing more intuitive and inheritance based object model.

GDI+ is generally considered a Windows technology. However, some of the new GDI+ features make this technology an excellent choice for Web applications, enabling developers to generate images, graphs, diagrams, and much more.

Jon Sykes has discovered a bizarre bug in Internet Explorer 7 (and presumably IE6 as there is next to no difference in the JScript engines). You probably wouldn’t encounter this bug very often but if you did it would really make you pull out your hair trying to debug.

There is a bug in IE7 where by a line of code inside a conditional statement that NEVER runs, can cause an object that is set with a fairly standard object declaration to be whipped. Even weirder is that it will have whipped the code even if you put a debug alert of the object before the code that does the whipping. Confused? I know I am.

Thankfully it does look fairly simple to work _around_ and avoid. But it’s probably a debug nightmare, and it’s a bug I couldn’t find referenced anywhere, so I figured it was worth sharing.

An article at Gaurdian illustrated another reason to be smart when choosing a password. Most think their password is safe just because the application encodes it using MD5. There are actually people out there that have posted the MD5 hashes and the words that go with them for common names and words.

The article explains more on this.

But Steven Murdoch began thinking. Who is there out there who has thousands of computers running all the time? Um, everyone. And some might be generating MD5 hashes and putting them on the web…

He took the hash - 20f1aeb7819d7858684c898d1e98c1bb - from the database and stuck it into Google. Lo and behold, it turned out to be “Anthony”.

Ajax with the ASP.NET MVC Framework
One of the prototypes is around bringing some basic Ajax functionality - basically to get post-back-less partial rendering and some behavior-like extensions to associate with DOM elements - sort of like ASP.NET Ajax but in a manner that fits with the pattern around how controllers and views are written. I should say that eventually Ajax functionality will exist out-of-the-box, so you can think of this as an early experiment, and by no means complete. In the spirit of experimentation, feedback and suggestions are welcome.

Automatic Bug Reporting in Global.asax
One thing I really like about .NET is the flexibility and speed it gives you to implement new functionality. By using ASP.NET’s Global.asax file, you can very easily hook into any major application events that occur in your system. Perhaps one of the most useful of these is the Application_Error event, which fires everytime an unhandled exception occurs within your site. During your testing phase, this can be a very useful place to find out how your users are experiencing your stystem.

I cleaned up the site a bit today. I cleaned up the theme and made some changes to the categories. Both should help the site to feel cleaner and navigate easier.

The changes to the theme also resolve a layout bug when displaying search results in Firefox and Opera.

I will be making further changes to enhance code highlighting, block quotes, and logo redesign.

.Net Playground has put together a great series on avoiding mistakes when using ASP.Net AJAX.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

I’ve worked with ASP.NET AJAX long enough now to appreciate both the increases in productivity on the development side, whilst also discovering the significant bloat it adds to sites where it’s implemented. In light of this, I’ve decided to put up a number of posts on how you can reduce the dependancy your sites have on this model.

On the development side of things, the ASP.NET AJAX model is fantastic. Any part of your site that you want working asynchronously you just drop inside an UpdatePanel and you’re away. You don’t need to code nor maintain any javascript, it’s simply plug & play.

However with this convenience comes a lot of overhead. Not only do visitors to your site have a significant initial download to get all the javascript libraries, each call from a control or trigger for an UpdatePanel will then cause the entire viewstate for that page to be sent to the server, and a new one returned. This is where things can get out of hand.

For small sites with a limited number of sever controls on a page, the viewstate can be quite small and hence this isn’t an issue. However as the size and scale of your site increases, it’s almost inevitable that more server controls will be added to your page, increasing the viewstate size, and each subsequent postback to the server.

Why MVC Has Me Concerned
Everyone is talking about the new MVC framework that will be released in the coming weeks as a CTP, and so far everyone is very pumped about the way it will revolutionize web application development…how it will allow us to utilize testing tools, TDD, etc. It’s always mentioned with reverence and joy.

Well, hello: my name is Killjoy…

ASP.NET MVC Framework is almost here
Tutorials and previous are already posted on the web, As always Scott Guthrie is the first person to provide with an complete overlook of the new framework.

Mozilla Announces Screaming, Iron, Action Monkeys - Tamarin in IE
Brendan Eich always delivers on a great keynote, and to conclude the opening day of the show, he had some announcements up his sleeve.

Mozilla has three monkey’s up their sleeve:

Juan DoNeblo has put together an amazing tutorial on getting started with Virual Earth Mashups. This is a must read if you are even thinking about taking Virtual Earth for a test drive.

In this article we’ll see how easy it is to use Virtual Earth SDK to produce a simple mashup, using web services that provide information in JSON format.

If you are not familiar with JSON or how to integrate JSON services in ASP.NET AJAX applications, you can take a look at my 3-part series of articles on JSON and ASP.NET AJAX here.

First of all, we need to create a simple .aspx page, and add a ScriptManager to it. Then, we’re going to reference the Virtual Earth API in the ScriptManager’s Script section…

Funny cartoon I read today. If only…

Click to see whole strip…