Section: Blogs

ImageShack Toolbar causes incorrect results from ASP.NET’s browser checking code

Jan 10, 2008 2 min.

We recently updated a few of our web sites with code that would provide a ‘nicer’ experience for browsers that were not compatible with the ASP.NET ATLAS (AJAX) scripts we were using. For some reason though, a few users who were running a fully compatible browser (Firefox 2.0.0.*), were seeing the no-script experience. We were puzzled, but one of the users figured out that their ImageShack toolbar might be causing the problem.

Code Metrics in Visual Studio 2008 and the EvNet project

Jan 8, 2008 1 min.

I don’t know if this is good or bad, but I thought it was neat that I could right-click the main project (excluding all our client script and HTML) that runs behind on10.net, pick code metrics and see cool #s like “23,442 lines of code” 🙂 Lately though, I’ve seen us reducing that number while adding features, so this might the highest result I’ll ever see for this project 🙂

The Viewport Meta Tag and the iPhone

Jan 3, 2008 1 min.

I’ve been fiddling around with mobile interfaces for both my personal site and for the various sites I work on (http://on10.net, http://channel9.msdn.com, amongst others) and I noticed the use of on some other mobile sites. A quick search and I found a great discussion of the viewport meta tag on furbo.org (the apple developer site provides the same info in a more reference format). Turns out this simple meta tag helps Mobile Safari determine how best to scale your site for the smaller screen of the iPhone (relative to a desktop that is).

Looking for good examples of Mobile Interfaces

Jan 1, 2008 2 min.

I’m part of a dev team that builds blog/forum software and I’ve been thinking about mobile interfaces lately… so I’m trying to find a good example of site like ours that provides a good (enjoyable, useful and usable) mobile interface… one that will work across a variety of browses. It seems 37 Signals is thinking about the same thing these days and they’ve made a blog post looking for exactly the same thing I am, examples of good mobile interfaces.

Trying to open a file into VS 2005/2008 … never works from Explorer

Dec 20, 2007 1 min.

So I have a file on disk, web.config in this case, and I right click and pick ‘open with | Visual Studio 2008’ … and I get this: Windows cannot find ‘C:\projects\9\web.config’. Make sure you typed the name correctly, and then try again. [OK] VS 2008 opens, but no file. If I then pick the file from File | Open it works fine… what the hell? As far as I can remember, this was true with VS 2005 and it has annoyed me every day…

I’m planning to get rid of setting our Theme in ASP.NET

Dec 17, 2007 1 min.

The auto inclusion of all our CSS files has finally become too annoying. We’ll still use the app_theme directory, as it is a handy way to store our stuff… but I’m really hoping to not set the theme, and to add the appropriate CSS for the situation (mobile vs desktop for example) while also combining our CSS files and ‘minifying’ them all through a simple ‘css.ashx’ style handler. This should make it easier to do that combining at run time, while leaving them nice and separate for debug and development purposes.

Xbox.com Personalities answer a bunch of holiday questions

Dec 14, 2007 1 min.

Trixie had all of us Xbox.com column writing folks answer a bunch of holiday themed questions recently, and I noticed tonight that the answers are all up on the site! Check out some interesting Q&A with Trixie, Major Nelson and others (including me, Xbox Dad). Xbox.com Personalities at the Holidays We asked the Xbox.com personalities to share some information on their holiday favorites. What did we learn? Egg nog, “A Christmas Story,” and Dean Martin pwn.

Futurama the movie…

Dec 14, 2007 1 min.

Just added this to my queue at Blockbuster: “Matt Groening’s cult hit series Futurama takes its killer wit to DVD with this full length movie consisting of a brand new story with all new animation and the complete, original voice cast.”