Archives
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IE6 Tabs with MSN Toolbar - Nice idea, flawed implementation
When I heard that MS was adding tabbed browsing features to IE6 via the MSN Toolbar, I thought it sounded like a great idea. Unfortunately, the implementation of the idea isn't so hot. Things I've noticed so far, just in playing around with it for a few minutes.
- Creating a new tab and switching tabs causes the entire UI to flash and repaint in a very annoying way. This is the biggest problem I have with the feature - it's very distracting.
- Explorer bar visibility is remembered per-tab. This causes the UI to rearrange itself as you flip tabs.
- There doesn't seem to be a way to open a Favorites item in a tab.
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MSBuild with Solutions
When you build a Visual Studio 2005 solution file from the command-line using MSBuild, it constructs an in-memory MSBuild project, that project is what actually gets built. It turns out it's possible to have MSBuild save that temporary MSBuild project to disk, to make it easier to understand what's going on. To do this, set the MSBuildEmitSolution environment variable to 1, then build the solution. MSBuild will save a .sln.proj in the same directory as the solution.
This trick came in handy to answer two related questions I had about building solutions - how do you build just a specific web project of a solution, and how do you build a particular target of a particular project in the solution. You can determine this by inspecting the target names generated in the solution project file. It's turns out that the current MSDN documentation is wrong here. The MSBuild command line reference documentation says to specify "MSBuild solution.sln /t:<Project Name>.<Target Name>". But in reality the correct syntax is "MSBuild solution.sln /t:<Project Name>:<Target Name>" -
Thanks to Lukasz Gwozdz of the MSBuild team for this info.
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My first GreaseMonkey script - MSDN Product Feedback
It's a bit of a pain to use Microsoft's Product Feedback Center to report bugs using Firefox. The various text areas for describing the problem are very narrow when rendered in Firefox, which makes it unpleasant to enter long descriptions. If you compare the HTML source on Firefox vs IE, you'll see that on IE the text areas are rendered with width of 100%, but on Firefox the width is not specified. This has been a problem for ages, but I guess it hasn't percolated up the priority list for the MS folks.
Enter GreaseMonkey. Register the following GreaseMonkey script:
var allTextareas, thisTextarea;
against the PF url:
allTextareas = document.getElementsByTagName('textarea');
for (var i = 0; i < allTextareas.length; i++)
{
thisTextarea = allTextareas[i];
thisTextarea.style.width = "100%";
}
http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/ProductFeedback/EditFeedback.aspx*
and bingo, you get nice wide text areas.