Pop Art Blog

Hooray! The feedback from the web development community convinced the IE development team to change their minds about the default setting for version targeting in IE8 (as I discussed in a previous post ). “In light of the Interoperability Principles, as well as feedback from the community, we’re choosing differently. Now, IE8 will show pages requesting ‘Standards’ mode in IE8’s Standards mode. Developers who want their pages shown using IE8’s ‘IE7 Standards mode’ will... Read More...

Previously on Web Developer Controversies: Aaron Gustafson from the Internet Explorer development team announced that IE8 will use a META tag to kick the engine into standards mode by targeting a specific browser version, something that was previously done by using a valid DOCTYPE. A lot of people, including Jeremy Keith, think this is a bad idea. Here are some of the more interesting points that have been raised in the discussion so far. “If IE8 acts like IE8 by default, then IE8 might break... Read More...

With no success I spent several hours a couple weeks ago attempting to get PHP 5.2.4 on a Windows Apache web server to talk to an MS SQL 2005 Server that was installed as an instance on a server running an older version of MS SQL. I was able to connect to the default instance of MS SQL server running on the machine, but nothing I did would allow it to connect to the named instance running 2005. Returning to this project today with fresh eyes I found the two key bits of information that I had previously... Read More...

In my experiences as a software developer, its fairly normal to hear comments like the following: That's too many hours They don't have the budget I'm not paid enough I had the good fortune of attending a Portland XP Users Group presentation a few weeks ago by James Shore. He got off on a slight tangent and gave us (well, at least me) a simple equation to chew on: He explained that at its core, Return On Investment is represented by the previous equation. It can help explain quite a bit... Read More...

Update 11/27/2007 We do quite a bit of Flash video integrated into ASP.NET web applications. For video library application, the best solution from a usability perspective is to use JavaScript to control the flash player. There are some issues that keep popping up with the Flash Player, SwfObject, ExternalInterface, and ASP.NET that we needed to document for the good of the world. Hopefully, we'll save someone the hours that our team took to figure this stuff out. First, we begin with some background... Read More...

We recently upgraded the Pop Art Blog to Community Server 2007 , and I was assigned to upgrade the templates. Dave produced a wonderful comp, and when I read about CS2007’s new Chameleon Theme Engine , I was pretty excited. The actual experience of working with the templates turned into a bit of a nightmare, however. Before I get into how it went wrong, let me point out what went right. First of all, we did eventually succeed in getting nearly everything we wanted done, and I’m incredibly proud of... Read More...

I'm working on a solution that requires a special type of chart to visualize results from some elaborate number crunching algorithms. Dundas Chart for .Net has an implementation of the standard polar chart. That's the closest "buy" option I could find and it might very well do the job. I'm a big fan of using existing software when it can solve a significant portion of the problem domain. When you find a good off-the-shelf option, they're often inexpensive and supported ... Read More...