I've had a tip off to check two killer apps.
First is
JQuery. It was plugged to me as the new mootools!
Completly supporting older browsers, it's on-site samples and documentation are ment to be excellent. It is also compatible with Google's JTools.
Second is
IETester. Useful if you need to test your sites on multiple IE versions and their equivilent JavaScript engines. It is a "free
WebBrowser that allows you to have the rendering and javascript engines of
IE8 beta 2, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process."
I swear that Microsoft are trying to force developers to move their sites from Classic ASP to ASP.NET. Not that I have anything against ASP.NET - I like it and I like Classic ASP less. But in reality, many sites work perfectly well in Classic ASP and don't need converting - even if a budget was available (which there usually isn't!)
OK. Many of us are aware of the dropping of friendly colours from VS2008 for .ASP. This was reintroduced in SP1 after the development community kicked up a huge fuss. The reason for this post however is due to another incident:
We have a site built in Classic ASP. We built a .NET COM aware component which we want to use to handle the importing and mangement of a CSV file. The process of builing a .NET COM object and using it Classic ASP is well documented, particularly in excellent article on
The Code Project.
A Microsoft patch (MS07-056) released on October 2007 for fixing security issues with IE7 causes ASP websites from not being able to use .NET COM active X controls. Why? IE7 and ASP / .NET COM interops should be pretty much unrelated. The error has not been fixed by Microsoft. There are workarounds include (a) uninstalling the patch (probably only available if it was installed as part of the specific patch) or (b) opening permissions to a registry key in NETWORK SERVICE user account!
What's more, after you finally manage to apply the fix, it will only take effect after a restart of the webserver. You can't tell whether you have fixed the error until after the reboot. So much for 99.999% uptime!
Getting to grips with Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008.
I have a fresh install of Windows XP Professional SP3 installed.
Setting up the network was a bit fiddily but the rest has been really smooth.