April 2009 - Posts
As most people know, IE8 was written to be as compliant with the W3C standards as possible, which means that existing sites may not work properly when view from IE8 in Standards mode. All of the Server-side asp controls appear to be compliant with the exception of the asp:Menu control. Microsoft has published the article FIX: The pop-out menus are not displayed when you use Internet Explorer 8.0 in Standards mode to view an ASP.NET Web page that has dynamic menus that links to 2 different hotfixes depending upon which OS you are serving from. To read the full article from the IE8 dev team, go to:
asp:menu fix for IE8 problem available
While discussing a new project today, one thing that came up was the behemoth of an application that Community Server has become and the idea that we don't want Sueetie to go in that same direction. A few years ago, you could say WAP and no one would know what the hell you are talking about. Today, if anyone doesn't know what WAP is, you can write them off as a developer who doesn't know what he's talking about. However, very few people know that you can break up a WAP into several sub-projects. You can also add .aspx pages to a library class, but that's a topic for another time. If you want to know more about WAP and sub-projects, here are some links for you:
I provided the sub-items as an easy way to see the actual posts that ScottGu is referring to.
Yep, that's right. Over the past 2 years, Apple has been working very hard with the music labels and artists to convert all of its media to iTunesPlus (256Kbps AAC encoded & DRM free), and today they turned off the DRM switch. I wrote It's time for an iTunes Boycott of DRM music labels back in January, and the content from those music labels and/or artists has been removed. The latest info about iTunes can be found here:
What's New
A few tracks are $1.29, but the vast majority of the music is still $0.99. I have noticed that some of the tracks that previously were not available as singles (i.e. required the purchase of the entire album), are now available at the $1.29 price while the rest of the tracks are still $0.99. The good thing is that the album prices don't seem to have changed, and you still get full credit for all portions of the album that you have purchased (including iTunesPlus upgrades) when it comes to Complete My Album.
Now if I could only find an easy way to post my iTunes Playlists on a web site, I'd be set. BTW, for those who are not aware, all of the portable media in the iTunes Store can now be played on ANY portable device. So whether you iPod, iPhone, iTouch, Generic MP3 play, or even Zune, you can use iTunes. The only down side at this point is that iTunes can't directly download to a non-Apple device, so you'll need to use the software for your portable player to do the transfers, but who knows, that may change. 
Apparently, IE8 was released on March 11, 2009 and is available for download at:
Internet Explorer 8: Home page
I've only been playing with it for a few minutes, but it does seem to be a little faster than IE7. There is a new Tab Grouping feature (turned on by default) which appears to give tabs that have children tabs, and the children tabs themselves, a background color to define them as a group. Tabs that are not part of a group, or are the last remaining tab of a group, have the normal Windows colors until a child tab is created. At first it looks a little funky, but I'm going to leave it on for a while and see if I like it.
If you have run into any troubles, or just have something to say about IE8, please post a comment here. The download was only about 12MB for the 32 bit version, and 24MB for the 64 bit version (which obviously contains the 32 bit version as well).