Latest Microsoft Blogs

Apologies for going dark the last little while, I'm going to do my best to change that again. Lots of stuff going on here that I'm really excited about, but before I get into that, I want to do an unscientific survey. We currently offer developers and designers the following VPC images: XP + SP2 with IE6 XP + SP2 with IE7 We're looking at the next batch now, and I'm curious, if we were to add one more, which of the following would you prefer? Vista with IE7 Vista + SP1 with IE7 Also, if you're a Mac user, and want to see either VPC images compressed with ZIP, or Parallels users, a comment would be appreciated. No promises on these, I just want to understand what is more important to you. Thanks! PEte Read More...

A couple of days ago, I got an email from the guys at DebugBar letting me know that they had just released their Beta1 for Debug Bar 5.0. They've got a pretty good tool bar for doing web design and web development in IE. Their DebugBar adds features like a DOM Inspector, an HTTP Inspector, a JavaScript Console and Inspector, an HTML Validator among other things. It's free for personal use, and the commercial license is easy to obtain. There are a couple of other tools worth pointing out as well Fiddler2 a web debugging proxy written by one of the PM's on the IE team IE Developer Tool Bar the Microsoft IE Developer Toolbar. There's lots of info on it here IE6 and IE7 Virtual PC images Visual Web Developer Express 2008 has great JavaScript debugging...

Confession time, I'm an online shopping addict. Amazon and I get along really well. Well, Amazon and my bank account don't get along well, but Amazon and I do. Along with many other online stores, I tend to do a good bit of shopping online. This morning, I got a tracking notification for a package that is being shipped to me, and it occurred to me this morning that you could easily create a search provider for UPS (or most other shippers for that matter) and have it appear in your IE7 Inline Search box really easily. The easiest way to add it is to go to Add Search Providers to Internet Explorer 7 and in the "Create Your Own" box, add http://wwwapps.ups.com/WebTracking/processInputRequest?sort_by=status&error_carried=true&tracknums_displayed...

It's crazy to me that I've been in this new role for just over a year now, in fact, it's just about 13 months. In that time, I've seen IE7 ship, taken on new products like Expression Web and Visual Web Developer, met so many fantastic developers and designers and have had the awesome opportunity to travel all over the place for work. Today, we updated the installation experience to make IE7 available to as many Windows users as possible. As of today, IE7 will no longer require Windows Genuine Advantage validation, and will be available to all Windows XP users. If you're not already running IE7, you can get it from the Internet Explorer home page on Microsoft.com. We've made a few other small tweaks to the UI, including enabling the menu bar...

At TechEd this year, I presented a session where I presented my top five pet peeves on the web, the biggest and easiest problems to avoid on the web. With how easy it is to share content on the web, I felt that these top five things were the best and easiest to get rid of. In order, I felt they were: 5. Unprofessional Site Design 4. Lousy Content 3. Poorly coded HTML/CSS/JavaScript 2. Inappropriate use of Rich Content 1. Not Being POSH I've attached my slides below, so check them out, and let me know what your pet peeves are! Read More...

Wow, just wow, that's all I really need to say. MIX07 was insane, an absolute great time, and some fantastic new stuff coming out from Microsoft for the web. So what were the highlights, for me it came down to three things, first the announcements around Silverlight, second was all the great sharing we got to do about IE, and third, was meeting some fantastic people. I didn't really get a chance to blog while I was at MIX this year, which I wish I had, but we were all so busy, attending sessions, hanging out, hearing what you had to say, eating drinking and being merry. IE As Chris mentioned on the IE Blog , we didn't have anything to announce this year at MIX, we were there to listen, and provide some information. Chris's IE session was standing...

While at lunch today, we got on to the conversation of web design and web development resources. I have sitting on my desk at all times, well, unless I'm using them at home: Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide by Eric Meyer Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook by Dan Cederholm Web Design Index 5 from The Pepin Press I've got a few other books that I keep handy, though I'm noticeably missing an HTML book, and a copy of the W3C CSS 2.1 spec. I've got a few websites that I like to keep an eye on for resources, for example, color charts, HTML escape sequences, and such. What about you, what are your favorite sites/books? What's sitting on your desk? Read More...

One of my pet peeves about CSS and HTML standards is sometimes, they aren't overly explicit, and browser vendors pick arbitrary values for things like line height, or margin or padding and the like. Eric Meyer has talked about a reset.css stylesheet that would effectively eliminate those differences and override the browsers value with the ones that you know and you specify. I'm excited to see that he posted a version of it (though reading the comments, it sounds like there will be a few revisions coming) on his blog today. I'd highly recommend checking it out. He based it on the one from the guys at Yahoo! UI , added a few things and tweaked a few others. It's certainly one way to help eliminate those frustrating hair pulling "why isn't this...

I've been following the comments over on the IE blog about Molly's post, particularly the comments of Chris Beall, thacker and steve_web, and I figured I'd post a bit of a follow up to what they were saying and ask for feedback from the community. In the IE7 timeframe, with the connect database open, we took in close to 10,000 bugs. I don't remember the exact number, but it was closer to 10,000 than 5,000. Yes, you read that right. The problem is that realistically, the number of real customer bugs out of that 10,000 submitted was tiny. I'm talking fractionally tiny. So what makes a bad bug. We got bugs that basically said "IE sucks". That was it. No more detail than that. Every bug like that, takes time for someone to look at, triage, resolve...

We've seen a few reports of people having problems with the recently released IE6 VPC image. At first I thought it was because people were running the image on non-Microsoft virtualization software, which causes the image to be invalidated. But, I got a report internally from someone who confirmed they were running the VPC on Virual PC 2007, and sure enough. Obviously, that's not the problem, and I'm not sure what the problem is. I'm going to spend a few hours this week trying to track it down, but the short answer I think it that I'll end up having to release a new image. Sucky, I know. But, I do have one peice of good news. I'm going to build two Windows XP images in parallel. One for IE6, and we're going to release an IE7 on Windows XP virutal...