Have a look at this link: https://survey.google.com/wix/p0986235.aspx Uhm… let’s have a look at the source HTML of the page, and we’ll not find the “_VIEWSTATE” hidden field (it should be there also if we disable the viewstate in the @Page directly and for every control in the page) and the “__DoPostBack” Javascript method to submit the form… ? I may be completely wrong, they could have removed the unused _viewstate hidden field on the server right before sending the html stream to the client, but why? Just to save 2-3 Kb? Don’t know… sounds like a “trick”… maybe they just wanted to check the reaction about the file extension… ? Just to be clear: I don’t find anything wrong with it, just fun ? What do you think? Carlo
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Channel9 speaks Italian
A few weeks after the Italian MS bloggers have joint in a (for the moment) small community and started promote their content, today I’ve been told that Channel9 started hosting non-English content, and guess what…? The first video of this series (in the home page ?) is in Italian! ? They’ll interview Italian people working in Redmond, of course talking about technology; in this first video Vittorio Bertocci interviews Mauro Ottaviani and they talk about WCF and performance. So, if you can read Italian keep an eye on https://channel9.msdn.com/tags/Italia? Carlo
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Spell checker missing in Windows Live Writer beta 2
A few days ago I installed the newly released beta 2 of Windows Live Writer, and immediately noted (with a bit of disappointment) that the spell checker was missing… 🤔 After various tests (reinstalling on other machines I have, checking that all assembly versions were the right ones etc…) I decided to open a call through http://support.live.com (yes, this time I’ve been the customer and not the Support Engineer 😊). They’ve been very quick, and after a few emails I’ve been pointed to this post: the trick is use this custom launcher instead of running WindowsLiveWriter.exe directly, and I got my spell checker back and working like a charm 🤓. Following up this with the WLW support and we found that, even if I’m running only English operating systems (WinXP, Win2003 and Vista x64), all with Italian keyboard layout, and at least on the XP machine I also have the Italian .NET Framework package, the difference is made by my Regional and Language options which, as you may guess, I set to Italian; as a test I switched it to English US and the spell checker showed up in the Tools menu even without the custom launcher. It worth mentioning that…
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Orcas Beta 1 released
I’m really not a marketing guy and don’t like that much the kind of shiny advertisements which makes everything looking like the best bargain ever, but I think this time it work making an exception to the rule 😊 So, here is a bit of advertising: Visual Studio code name “Orcas” enables developers and development teams to rapidly create connected, secure and compelling applications on the latest platforms, including Windows Vista, Longhorn, the 2007 Office System and the Web The expanded and improved offerings in Visual Studio code name “Orcas” for software development teams, including tools for database professionals and greater collaboration between development organizations and designers Visual Studio code name “Orcas” delivers improvements to Visual Studio Team System that help software development organizations communicate and collaborate more effectively, providing greater predictability and reliability of their software development processes The .NET Framework 3.5, based on proven technology, adds new features in several major technology areas including: Deep integration of Language Integrated Query (LINQ) and data awareness throughout the runtime, compiler, and class libraries. This new feature will let code written in LINQ-enabled languages to filter, enumerate, and create projections of several types of collections using the same syntax Support for…
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Vista and CHM
Now I understand why I have troubles viewing the electronic MSDN Magazine, have a look at this post from Chris Crowe… 😲 But I have to say that usually when I’m in that condition, expanding the content tree on the left and clicking on another topic solves the problem, at least on my machine… never mind, unlocking the file is just 3 seconds and fixes the problem forever 😊 Cheers
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CSSVista and IE Developer Toolbar to easily customize how your site/blog looks
While working to customize a bit my blog (and you can easily see I’m not a graphic designer! 🤔) I struggled trying to understand and sort out the tangle of CSS styles I can override to change how these pages look (at this is still “work in progress”). Luckily in our internal blogger discussion list someone (don’t remember exactly who, sorry…) suggested to use CSSVista, a cool tool which allows you to edit your CSS styles and have a “live” preview of what the results are. If you use this in combination with the IE Developer Toolbar, which allows you to easily inspect the DOM in your page and find which CSS style is applied to every element (among many other things you can discover with the toolbar) and with some experience with CSS editing, it should not be that hard to restyle your page. The only problem left is how it will look like at the end… 🤞😏 (I definitely need some graphic advices…) Cheers
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Enable System Restore on Windows 2003
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where after installing some particularly appealing application, a new video driver which promises astonishing effects with your new PC game, and after a reboot the system simply refuses to start? Or maybe you enter your credentials as you already did probably a million times, and you then end up watching a box which tells “Applying computer settings” but this lasts forever? Being quite curious towards technology and technical gadgets (not necessarily meaning Vista gadgets 😊), and due to may job where I have to often install and test on my machine sample application I get from customers, unfortunately I found myself in this situation more than once and luckily in those occasions I’ve been saved by the by System Restore feature available in Windows XP. When a while ago I decided to switch on Windows 2003 as my primary working machine, and I then needed to restore the system to a earlier point, I discovered that System Restore is not available in our server platform… but I didn’t want to give up that “parachute” which saved me so many times (but not in that occasion… that is a lesson I learnt in…
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Help, my application crashes! No, it hangs… Uhm… we get a strange error… What…?!? (the importance of a proper problem description)
Dealing on a daily basis with customers and the problems they encounter using Microsoft technologies and products, and having to help them troubleshoot and resolve those problems, specially at the beginning of a new support call (after I pick the case up from the incoming queue and put it in my wipbin, as it’s called my personal queue in our CRM software) I call the customer to discuss about the problem and to get a detailed overview of the faulting application, the environment where it’s running (or it is supposed to run), the error they get, under which circumstances they get it (under load picks, any specific operations going on at that time on the server, any reproducible behavior by one of the clients…), side effects (high memory, high CPU, performance slowness…), how they (at least temporarily) get rid of it (recycle the application pool, iisreset, recompile…). in those situations, quite often I end up asking almost the same questions to every customer to start building a picture of the situation, and when I think I have this quite clear in my mind I can elaborate an action plan to start digging into the situation questing for the bad guy.No need to say…
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Visual Studio 2005 hotfixes made public for download
After reading this post a while ago regarding the availability Policy for some hotfixes (e.g., not all hotfixes are public for download, and you have to call Microsoft Support to obtain the one you need), I had an internal discussion with my team on this topic. Basically those are some of the reasons (at least the one I know about) for this controversial choice: As stated in every KB article, those fixes have not gone through the same accurate testing as public fixes or Service Packs, so it’s possible that with a particular configuration the fix a customer request is not the right approach for him We keep track of the hotfixes we send to customers, and if a bug or problem is later discovered in that particular fix, thanks for those records we know who has installed it and we are able to contact those customers to send them an updated version of the patch, or in any case inform them of the newly discovered problem and help them to avoid it More often than you can imagine, we receive clearly wrong hotfix requests: for instance, a particular exception in Framework 1.0 has been fixed and the KB article is still…