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I was talking to Erik Meijer yesterday and he said: JavaScript is an assembly language. The JavaScript + HTML generate is like a .NET assembly. The browser can execute it, but no human should really care what’s there. - Erik Meijer This discussion started because I was playing with Google+ and, as with most websites that I'm impressed with, I immediately did a View Source to see what was underneath. I was surprised. I saw this: Let's just say that this went on for about 1300 lines. It is tight and about 90k. This is just the first half. It's mostly minified JavaScript. The middle part of the page is all spans and divs and generated class ids like this: Oy. The whole page is a big GUID.  However, I see this on http://msn.com...

I was talking to Erik Meijer yesterday and he said: JavaScript is an assembly language. The JavaScript + HTML generate is like a .NET assembly. The browser can execute it, but no human should really care what’s there. - Erik Meijer This discussion started because I was playing with Google+ and, as with most websites that I'm impressed with, I immediately did a View Source to see what was underneath. I was surprised. I saw this: Let's just say that this went on for about 1300 lines. It is tight and about 90k. This is just the first half. It's mostly minified JavaScript. The middle part of the page is all spans and divs and generated class ids like this: Oy. The whole page is a big GUID.   However, I see this on http://msn.com...

First, let me start that if you want a lot of people to download something, make sure that the words "HTML5," "Support" and "Update" appear in the title. I'm sure if the folks that are making Diablo 3 called it "Diablo 3 HTML5 Support Update" that a metric buttload more people would download it. That said, a bunch of folks in the Web Platform and Tools team created the Web Standards Update package with HTML5 Support for the Visual Studio 2010 Editor . This Web Standards Update is something that anyone in the community could have released, just extending Visual Studio in a standard way. Like many other (most) extensions in Visual Studio Extension Gallery, it was not "signed." It was not a...

There aren't enough funny developer talks in my opinion. Lots of you folks are so funny in person and when I got to conferences or just have lunch we laugh and laugh. As with all niches or cliques, we're all part of a little club of inside jokes and shared stories. It's always weird to get lots of comments on my technical talks. Many are positive, but sometimes I'll get one like "your not funy!" or "stop joking and start coding." Well, I realize my brand of edutainment isn't for everyone. That said, this talk is happily content-free. If you hate my jokes, you may ignore it. ;) Many years ago I did some local open mics and stand up, although I've never really put together a tight hour of material. I'm...

I was in Belgium and The Netherlands this last week presenting and talking to folks in the community. After I presented on ASP.NET MVC 3, HTML5 and jQuery, one fellow came up after and said, "Should I use Silverlight or HTML5. I don't understand what Microsoft's strategy is or what to use in my app." Since I work for the Web Platform and Tools team (ASP.NET, IIS, etc) I spend a lot of time working, coding, and thinking about the web. However, I'm not an official strategist, or marketing guy.  But I do have an opinion; one that is mine and no one else's. That said, I don't think it's that hard and I'm surprised there's so much confusion about this (both outside and inside Microsoft.)  Companies...

While I (really) unplugged in December of 2009, you can access a nice calendar of all my 2009 posts (as well as other years) at this link . In 2008 I published a Greatest Hits post that I will keep updated, but here's a list of links to the posts I most enjoyed writing this last year. I hope you find some of them useful, and perhaps you missed one or two or you just started reading recently and this 2009 "Greatest Hits" Post will catch you up on the stuff I was thinking about this year. General Geekery Painful Reminder: Focus on Core Competencies (and Back Stuff Up) 10 Awesome Things I Remember About Computers FizzBin - The Technical Support Secret Handshake Paving my machine for a fresh 2009 - First-Pass Must-Haves Low Bandwidth...

I received an interesting email today where a fellow was trying to make sure that all browsers could successfully download his company's MSI installer. He had found a blog post that I wrote SIX YEARS AGO on the Content-Disposition header and some trouble I'd had with Check Images. Just in case you're not clear, 6 years is like a century years on the internet. Here's a little snippet from my incredibly old blog post: HTTP Headers are name values pairs, so they are easily added with the Response object in ASP or ASP.NET You use it like this (the HTTP Headers): HTTP/1.1 200 OK <snip> Content-Disposition: filename=checkimage.jpg Content-Length: 76127 Content-Type: image/JPEG Or, if you want to immediately prompt the user with...

As web programmers, we use a lot of strings to move data around the web. Often we’ll use a string to represent a date or an integer or a boolean. Basically "1" in instead of 1, or "April 1, 2009" rather than a proper ISO-8601 formatted culture-invariant date. While these strings are flying around via HTTP it's not a huge deal, but sometimes this loose, even sloppy, use of strings can leak into our own code. We might find ourselves leaving the data times as strings longer and longer, or not even bothering to convert them to their proper type at all. This problem is made worse by the proliferation of JSON, and schema-less/namespace-less XML (that I've often called " angle-bracket delimited files " as they're...

Here's a chart showing ONLY Internet Explorer visits to my blog over the last few weeks: I'm bummed to see that nearly 20% (17.96%, in fact) of my visitors are using IE6. (Interesting that 8% are already using IE8!) There's a great website that's attempting to deal with this and get folks off of IE6, called http://www.stoplivinginthepast.com . It all started like this and spread over Norway like wildfire . Hopefully it'll spread over the rest of the world and we can all add one less browser we need to test against. There's lots of ways you can add a warning to your website or blog. The EASIEST way would be to add some HTML like this: ( modified from examples posted here ) <!--[if lte IE 6]> <style type="text...

One of the things that I noticed immediately when I made the SmallestDotNet was that Firefox was reporting the version of the .NET Framework installed. There's a Firefox extension that is installed with .NET 3.5SP1. I was stoked about this because I'd like users of BabySmash to be able to use ClickOnce from Firefox to launch it. ClickOnce and Firefox When you install .NET Framework 3.5SP1, there's a key written to the registry whether Firefox is installed or not. If Firefox is installed later, it will notice the key and use the plugin. If it's already installed, it'll just work. The registry key points to a Firefox Extension (XPI) that acts like the 3rd party FFClickOnce extension that a lot of us installed before. The registry...