Visited IE test-drive site in my Chrome browser today and was greeted with a cheery banner:
I guess that “Don’t forget to enable your partial hardware acceleration in the about:flags thingy…” is a veiled reference that IE9’s HTML5 is fully “hardware accelerated”. Still funny.
Update: Since Microsoft is abandoning their “native HTML5” party line the funny logo has been removed as well. Too bad, especially after comparing FPS on speed tests.
If you’re trying to open an Excel 2003 XML file (SpreadsheetML) in Excel 2010 and getting “The file is corrupt and cannot be opened” error, try opening that file in WordPad (it will open as text XML) and save it back. Now try opening it in Excel 2010 again. You will still get “The file you’re trying to open is in a different format than specified by the file extension” warning, but after that the file should open.
IE6 just won’t die. I know, continue to support it is a bad idea, but unfortunately many developers have no choice, some environments, especially corporate intranet will continue to use it until second coming (and then Safari will rule the world).
So, here is a small tip: If you need to use a named color from CSS3+ specification that old tired browser doesn’t understand – just use color’s hex equivalent instead. For example instead of
style="border: solid 1px LightGray;"
which will do nothing in IE6 use
style="border: solid 1px #d3d3d3;"
which will render nice light-gray border.
This is probably a very obscure situation, but it happened to me, it could happen to someone else. Scenario: an ASP.NET page with Infragistics UltraWebGrid inside of a WARP panel. A button outside the WARP serves as a trigger for partial postback. First click on the button causes expected partial postback, but on the second click page does full postback and is screwed after that. The issue happens only in IE6/7, page works correctly in IE8.
Another condition – page contains ASP.NET AJAX ScriptManager control with ServiceReference path pointing to an ASMX WebService.
Turned out the issue was caused by project being left in debug mode (in web.config debug=”true”). Which caused WebService page to be loaded with parameter “jsdebug” in query string. Which apparently IE6 and 7 didn’t like very much. Switching to debug=”false” in web.config solved the problem.
If you’re binding an ADO.NET DataTable to Infragistics UltraWebGrid and then programmaticaly sort the grid (e.g. add a column to a band’s SortedColumns collection) you may get an error:
Cannot find column My Column Name.
with stack trace starting from grid databinding and finishing in datatable’s sorting:
at System.Data.DataTable.ParseSortString(String sortString)
at System.Data.DataView.CheckSort(String sort)
at System.Data.DataView.set_Sort(String value)
at Infragistics.WebUI.UltraWebGrid.DBBinding.ProcessDataViewForFillRows(DataView dataView, RowsCollection rows)
at Infragistics.WebUI.UltraWebGrid.DBBinding.FillRows(UltraWebGrid grid, RowsCollection rows, IEnumerable datasource)
at Infragistics.WebUI.UltraWebGrid.DBBinding.BindList(IEnumerable datasource)
at Infragistics.WebUI.UltraWebGrid.DBBinding.DataBind(Object dataSource, String dataMember)
at Infragistics.WebUI.UltraWebGrid.UltraWebGrid.DataBind()
If the grid binds OK without sorting and grouping, but fails with either – most likely the culprit is one of the columns in data table. Continue reading →
If you’re using MS Chart Control for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 (in .NET Framework 4.0 it comes as a part of a framework), you may experience a strange behavior when chart images aren’t rendered on the page:
If you’re using HTTP Handler to serve chart images (image URL looks something like “…/ChartImg.axd?i=chart_24dae5cb1f024c4a89f4fe492f05cc59_0.png“) missing mapping in IIS configuration could be to blame Continue reading →
As you may be aware Internet Explorer 8 will share session among its different instances (even if you start new instance by clicking IE Desktop icon). Why on Earth this was done is described in this article. The only way to start a new session is to use obscure File -> New Session option in menu, interesting choice, considering that in IE8 menu is hidden by default.
But this is not the end. Quoting the article:
Relying on closing the window to clear the session is not a recommended way to implement proper logoff for an application. Because this clearly will not work if there is another window that is sharing the session.
True, buy why, pray say, session isn’t cleared for one application if its window closed, but another window remains open, pointing to a completely different application, on different server in different DOMAIN?!
Do try this:
Also, aren’t they aware that 99.9% of all users will simple close browser window instad of going thru logout process even if it takes only one click? And in many scenarious, including one above user will stay logged in.
If you get the following error while browsing a page in Internet Explorer:
The value of the ‘method’ attribute may not be ‘html’
chances are MSXML registration is corrupted on your machine. To fix this, open DOS prompt and type following commands:
regsvr32 msxml.dll regsvr32 msxml2.dll regsvr32 msxml3.dll
This will re-register MSXML and the error will go away.
I have an existing ASP.NET application that uses Microsoft Charting control for .NET. I created a CCharting class that hold several methods related to getting data for the chart, applying chart appearance etc. Main method of that class is
Public Sub DrawChart(ByVal i_omsChart As Chart, ByVal i_iChartWidth As Integer, ByVal i_iChartHeight As Integer)
As a 1st parameter it accepts actual chart control from the page, 2nd and 3rd are chart width and height. The method then gets the data for the chart, binds chart to that data, applies chart appearance (colors, series, axises) etc. So drawing a chart is a simple as instantiating the class and calling the method:
Dim oCharting As New CCharting CCharting.DrawChart(xmsChart,500,300)
where xmsChart is a chart control from HTML markup of the page. The result is displayed on the page:
But now I needed to give access to that chart to external applications, that do not have access neither to chart data nor to Microsoft charting control, may run under different OS’s, be Web apps or not. Continue reading →
If your ASP.NET application worked fine in your Development environment, but after deploying it to staging or production crashes with error:
Could not load type System.Web.UI.ScriptReferenceBase from System.Web.Extensions
most likely it was compiled against .NET 3.5 SP1 but the target machine has original .NET 3.5 framework without SP1. The solution is download Service Pack 1 and install it on target server. Another possibility – compile the project against original .NET 3.5 framework.