Latest Microsoft Blogs

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...

There's been some confusion about the size of the .NET Framework. The .NET Framework is not really a 200+ meg download.  Which installer do I use? Here's the whole thing in a nutshell for Developers, ISVs, and Administrators. Offline Installer - One single file that can be run offline and can install the .NET Framework any system it's run on. It's complete, all platforms, installable offline. Online Installer - A 2.7 meg setup program that will detect what just the files you need, then go download between 10 and 60 megs. NOTE: If you're IT and inside an office, you'll want to decide if you want everyone in the office downloading .NET separately, or if you just want download it once, and have them to run it off a...

Are you in King County/Seattle/Redmond/Bellevue Washington and surrounding areas? Are you a huge nerd ? Perhaps a geek ? No? Maybe a spaz , dork , dweeb or wonk . Maybe you're in town for an SDR (Software Design Review) or the ASPInsiders meeting. Quite possibly you're just a normal person . Regardless, why not join us for some Mall Food at the Crossroads Bellevue Mall Food Court on Tuesday, July 22nd around 6:30pm? Here's some links to help you remember and add this to your calendar, or head over to http://nerddinner.events.live.com . There's photos of previous Nerd Dinners up on Flickr thanks to Orcmid . Add to your calendar Microsoft Outlook Windows Live Calendar Apple iCal Yahoo! Calendar Google Calendar I hope to see you...

The Beta of .NET 3.5 and VS2008 SP1 is out . I'm sure everyone is blogging the heck out of it, so I'll try to add my own specific kind of value. There's fixes, many improvements (some subtle, some dramatic), and some new technology. Should You Fear This (Beta) Release? Maybe a little bit. Don't be afraid of the new assemblies or the bug fixes, I have found them to be very good and have no stability problems, but this Service Pack Installer might cause you some trouble in this beta, especially if you already have beta stuff installed over the top of VS2008RTM (the original version). It'll be correct when it releases later this summer. Now, if you're going to decide to install a Beta of a Service Pack, do read the ReadMe...

I'm thoroughly enjoying Twitter ( follow me !) Apparently others are enjoying it also as there's a funny estimate that it's costing $14 billion in lost productivity (via a back of envelope calculation ). There is about a million people on Twitter and maybe 60k adding each a month. Certainly it'll be blocked by most corporate firewalls soon for just this reason. Twitter is also down ALL the time and it's been having weekly (daily?) scale problems for a YEAR , culminating in rumors that the development team is leaving Ruby on Rails that have been denied by Evan Williams (via a "Tweet," of course). However, that doesn't change the fact that Twitter is down so often there is a site dedicated to " Twitter Down...

I've officially been blogging for six years this week. Yikes! It didn't all suck, but it was pretty rough there early on and I've finally found my blog's heartbeat . Here's a little about me if you're interested, but more importantly, here's some posts that are the most often-read according to the last several year's web server logs. If you enjoy them, consider subscribing via RSS or email . I also do a weekly podcast that you might like . It's available on iTunes and Zune and you can get the complete MP3 here . I publish an Ultimate Tools List each year at http://www.hanselman.com/tools that you might like. Blogging Blog Interesting - 32 Ways to Keep Your Blog from Sucking 7 Blogging Statistics Rules - There...

Have you ever looked at a word you use and see every day, like the word "What," and suddenly start doubting yourself and wonder if it's spelled correctly? There you go. What. Is THAT how it's spelled? That doesn't look right. Why would such a simple thing suddenly be called into question? Anyway, there's a glut of technical books out there, and I'm starting to realize that I take their style and their existence for granted. They usually describe what some product is and what it does. I really enjoy books/blogs and writing that spend less time on the What and more time on the So What? and Now What? and What For? I'd like to see more books that put technologies into a larger context and less on just What. It'd...