Latest Microsoft Blogs

I mentioned in a previous blog post that I’m doing one of my favorite sessions at TechEd again this year – Top 10 Design Mistakes Made By Web Developers.  I would consider myself a web developer, not so much a web designer.  I can make something that doesn’t look bad, but it’s typically doesn’t have Read More...

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 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...

<pokes head above blog wall> <moves some cob webs aside> hello! i'm back. :) a couple of months ago, I did an interview with Craig shoemaker about one of the session I did at TechEd this year, and he posted the interview a few weeks ago. I figured this would be a good place to start my blogging again! Top Web Design Mistakes http://getpixel8ed.com/shows/mistakes Pete LePage is Product Manager of Internet Explorer Developer Division and he doesn’t want your web site to stink. Sharing from his talk given at TechEd 2008, Pete highlights 10 common web design mistakes and tells you how you can bypass the same blunders. Pete also tells us how future features of Internet Explorer will help your visitors leave your site with a smile...

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...

I have three copies of Beginning Expression Web by Zak Ruvalcaba to give away. Heck, I'll even throw in a copy of Expression Web! First three people to email me with your full name, mailing address and phone number* get them :) *Microsoft Legal wants me to tell you: One copy per person/mailing address. I'll delete your contact info once I've shipped the package to you. If you're outside the USA, you're responsible for any taxes, etc... EDIT: These three books are gone. Thanks for the interest! :) Read More...

Phew. I've been pretty heads down the last month on a couple of different projects, and one of the biggers ones just went live today! This morning, I posted an item to the IE blog announcing that we're removing click to activate from Internet Explorer! The first "preview" patch will be available in early December, and then it will be included in the April 2008 Cumulitive Update for IE. I saw one person on the IE blog comment and ask why we're taking so long to just up and remove this. The simple answer is many customers don't like it when we make big changes to IE. It's that whole breaking the web thing that Chris keeps talking about. We do not expect any changes to the way web pages operate, but we want to give...

Yep, the internet is on! I think most of the comments I got yesterday all revolved around the fact that I posted all my presentations in PPTX format. I work for Microsoft, and well, I use PowerPoint to create my presentations. I figured most people, even if they didn't have PowerPoint on their machines would at least have the viewer so they could see the slides, but it sounds like quite a few people would rather have a PDF or some other format. So, here you go! TechEd: Top 5 Web Blunders ReMIX: Building Your Own Video Site ReMIX: Implementing Rich UI ReMIX: A Tour Around VS2008 ReMIX: Search Engine Optimization for Rich Media Note that these are stored on my personal website, so I can't guarantee how long they'll last as they're not on an official...

I think that this was my favorite session I did while doing all my ReMIX presentations. It was the one I found most interesting, and most relevant to the work that I do, and see many web developers and designers doing every day. I'm not sure if there is video for this session, but if it shows up, I'll be sure to link to it. In the mean time, I've included the slides for you to check out, and I'll try to get a blog post out about in the next week or two summarizing the info in the deck. Read More...