Latest Microsoft Blogs

I've decided to move my blog to my own site, so you can find me at... http://PeteLePage.com/blog PEte Read More...

Every November comes around and I’m always reminded how many conference seem to take place about now, it’s kind of crazy – in a good way.  I’m on to week three of travel, and haven’t seen my own bed in more nights than I care to count – but ah well! Where I’ve Been Last week was TechEd Europe in Berlin.  A great conference with lots of good materials!  Coincidentally it took place during the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, and the celebrations were pretty spectacular!  While I was there, I recorded a couple of TechTalks with my good pal Matt, they’re worth checking out! Windows Internet Explorer Web Slices and Accelerator Analytics Do you have an Accelerator or Web Slice on your website? This talk will cover...

I’ve had a few people email me, or email the IE blog to ask about running the IE VPC’s on other VPC hosts than Microsoft VPC so I figured I’d post this to my blog. I don't think anything has changed in the images since we've started producing them back in 2006. I'm pretty sure they've never worked on in Parallels, Fusion, or any other VPC environment than Microsoft VPC.  For whatever reason, the hardware key on a non-Microsoft VPC host is different than that of the Microsoft VPC host, and so Windows thinks that the hardware has changed, and it requires re-activation.  If you have your own XP activation code, you can use that and reactivate the image. According to the EULA that the legal folks wrote, you're only...

It’s been almost 2 years now since we first shipped the Internet Explorer testing VPC’s so that you could test IE6 and at the time IE7 on the same machine.  We understand the need for people to test IE6, IE7 and IE8 on the same machine, and remain committed to shipping the VPC’s!  The VPC’s will remain an important component of testing your sites, because they give you a real, and accurate way of seeing how your site interacts with not just rendering, but JavaScript, and other components in the browser.  But there’s a new option that will work fantastically for testing layout and rendering of pages, Expression Web SuperPreview.  SuperPreview allows you to compare multiple rendering engines side by side, or even super-impose...

I consider myself a developer more than a designer. In fact, I’m pretty bad at web design. I know what looks nice, and I know what doesn’t work well, but I’m not so good at creating kick butt designs. So, at TechEd last year, I presented “Top 10 Mistakes Made By Web Developers” and it went over extremely well, and I was asked to do it again this year. I did it twice at TechEd EMEA in Barcelona, and was asked to do it twice this year as we filled the room the first time! Since it was an Interactive session, it’s not recorded, nor are the slides put online but I offered to share some of the sites I used both as good sites and bad sites and also share the slides! I’ll be posting the demo code from WUX310 later this week! Thanks! Read More...

There are applications out there that will put IE4/5/6/7/8 on the same machine and let you switch between the different versions of IE, but there are a couple of problems with this.  I typically describe this type of situation as a Frankenbuild.  Any time you start messing with Windows core components, and changing OS level DLL’s, you’re setting yourself up for heartache.  You also don’t know if you’re replacing the whole set, or just a subset of the DLLs.  For example, if you’ve got IE8 installed on the box, and you put the IE6 rendering engine in, you have the IE6 rendering engine, the IE8 JavaScript engine and the IE8 networking stack.  Hmm, no real customer is ever going to see that.  You never know what the...

I got an email today asking about the best way to go about adding the X-UA-Compatible tags on ASP.NET pages where you’ve got a master page, and may want to over ride the X-UA-Compatible tag in some content pages, but not others. After playing around with it in Visual Studio for a few minutes, I pulled together the following scenarios: Access To The Server The optimal way to do this, if you have server level access, is to add the IE=EmulateIE7 as an HTTP Response Header from the server. Then, any pages served from that server will be rendered in IE7 mode. If Internet Explorer finds the X-UA-Compatible tag in both the HTTP Response Header, and as a META tag, the META tag will win out. Thus, if you've added the IE=EmulateIE7 to the server,...

I just finished presenting my last session of TechEd EMEA for 2008 and I'm sad to be leaving! But, hopefully I'll get another chance next year. My last session was a repeat of "Top 10 Web Mistakes" and I said I'd post some of the sites that I showed during the session, so here they are. Sites That Suck http://www.teacherxpress.com/ How am I supposed to find content on this site? http://www.continental.com Some validation errors are okay, others, maybe not so much. http://www.samanzerin.com/ I don't even know where to start, figuratively or literally. http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/traffic/seattle/flowmaps/bridges.htm http://wsdot.wa.gov/traffic/ Nice to see consistency on here. :) http://www.toyjoy.com/ Only pop ups? Really...

Here's the slide deck from my session at Web 2.0 Expo last week. I cut out a few things in order to get it to fit in the 50 minute slot they allotted me, so it's kind of short, if you're looking for full details, check out the deck from Fronteers as it has a bit more detail on things. I did add a bit about search providers to this deck, so there is a little new stuff there. It was great to be in NYC for the week, and I met a lot of great people. It was exciting to see all the people who want to see IE8 and hear their excitement about standards and the new features! I can't wait to deliver! Read More...

Here's the deck that I presented today at Fronteers 2008. Seems like people got something out of it, and was told by a couple of people that "wow, I have nothing to complain about any more"! Love it! Read More...