Ultimately, Microsoft is its own worst enemy -- the complacency that comes with lack of real competition, the overhead and culture that comes with a very large corporation (90+K strong last I checked), and the inability to bring truly compelling products to market is more devastating than anything Apple or Google does. And when we do a great job, we have to outdo ourselves with the next release, something that's become a bit of a challenge lately now that Moore's Law has shifted gears a bit, and we've released umpteen versions of Windows and Office.

JChung2006 said:

lewellyn said:

*snip*

Contact Pete LePage (http://blogs.msdn.com/petel/contact.aspx).  He used to announce new IE VPC's on his blog on a regular basis.  While he may be doing other things these days, I bet he could point you to the right person to contact about these.

The HtmlAnchor class can resolve virtual paths if you use the HRef property but can't if you set the attribute via the Attributes collection, I think. Definitely, it has screwy behavior, particularly if you're trying to use named anchors, e.g., <a href="#foo">Go to foo</a> and <a id="foo">Here's foo</a>. ASP.NET overriding the id attribute for its own purposes particularly sucks for this HtmlAnchor use case and is one of many reasons I am getting sick of WebForms. I love the low-level ASP.NET/IIS platform, but I'm looking forward to booting WebForms as soon as ASP.NET MVC is golden.

littleguru said:

corona_coder said:

*snip*

What's the problem with you? Really corona. What's up? Envy?

Prefix your gem command with sudo to give it administrative privileges (think of sudo as command-line UAC).

If you're just interested in dabbling with Web development technologies, PHP is the way to go as it has the lowest learning curve of the three you mentioned (Rails, PHP, ASP.NET). The downside of that learning curve is that it also has the least to offer when it comes to learning about Web development and programming.

Ruby's worth learning even if only in the sense that learning a new programming language expands your horizons.

Why the lucky stiff has written a DSL for GUI development called Shoes which you might find interesting.  It's more interesting than Rails, in my opinion - Shoes

1. Yes, a diverse skill set is useful.
2. Yes though I would also like to see tutorials covering classes of techniques rather than step-by-step processes.
3. 8 out of 10, assuming 10 is highest.

I dislike designs that focus solely on visual appeal. It is important to be visually appealing but not if you sacrifice usability and functionality in the process. I favor minimalist designs with large fonts that try to keep tasks as simple as possible. I don't like "kitchen sink" (as if everything but) or "power user" designs. I am also leery of any design that purports to be "intuitive," because usually the ones that say they are are not.

androidi said:

Duanerrr said:

*snip*

IDK if this is still the case with RTM. I used to run Vista beta on a slower laptop with less memory and it was easy to note differences. What I noted during the *beta* on the slower computer was that turning off things I wouldn't want to turn off like system restore, windows defender, uac, defrag, indexing all together gave notable perf boost. However on 4 GB c2d at 2.4 ghz or more the overhead of above on RTM is not enough to warrant losing any one of those.

Nevertheless XP feels still clearly faster than Vista on that old hardware even with all the useful services turned off (I ran the lappy with RTM for while before going back to XP). This could be explained by Vista being compiled with newer compiler that produce slower code for older computer and faster for Core 2. More likely explanation is that there's still a ton of new lower level stuff in Vista that has very little overhead but with slow system gets more pronounced. I've noticed that 1.6 ghz core 2 is clearly horribly slow compared to 3 ghz core 2. Really need that 2.4 min to make Vista usable though I think to get snappy Vista you need 4 ghz or new i7/Nehalem. And those new Intel SSD of course.

2008 just seems more responsive to me, probably because it comes with a lot less stuff turned on by default. Less is more. Like Raymond Chen says, "Doing nothing is really fast!"

HumanCompiler said:

JChung2006 said:

*snip*

They have so far.  Have you tried IE 8 Beta 2?  Very fast (like FF 3 and Chrome).  Feels about the same to me.

I've tried IE 8 beta 2.  It's comparable to Firefox 3.0 and Safari 3.1 for JavaScript performance.  V8 (Google Chrome) and TraceMonkey (Firefox 3.1) outperform it for JavaScript code, but the network I/O and DOM interactions (layout) on Web pages render those benefits mostly moot anyway.  I'm not sure how SquirrelFish (WebKit 4.0) compares.

The JScript team is making up lots of ground, which is encouraging! For years, they were pretty much the worst for JavaScript performance. It wasn't that it was especially bad (except for the memory leaks), just horribly neglected. They've even patched IE6 JS enough so that Gmail will continue to support IE6 as a platform - New Gmail Code Base Now for IE6 [Gmail Blog, Google]

JoshRoss said:

JChung2006 said:

*snip*

I am going through ISA.  Strange.

I have been getting inconsistent results on the homepage from our ISA Server lately, where rarely the results are compressed end-to-end and most times they're not.  No ideas why it's happening but it used to be consistently compressed traffic between the outside world and the ISA server and uncompressed traffic between the ISA server and internal hosts.

Even with GZip compression, with that much script, we're taking a hit on client-side performance with just JavaScript parsing, execution, and DOM interaction. With Mozilla and Google raising the bar on JavaScript performance, I hope that the IE and JScript teams will step up their game for their vNext's.

lewellyn said:

JChung2006 said:

*snip*

Hm. OK. At least I'm not living in some parallel universe from everyone else.

Luckily, the majority of my testing right now is to make sure I didn't break IE 6's rendering. So, when I do my run-through on IE 7, I'll reboot the Mac into XP.

But, here's to hoping that someone who can get a new VHD released notices soon.

heskew said:

JChung2006 said:

*snip*

At home I'm getting ~190K -> Scripts (8 files) - 190 KB (711 KB uncompressed)

Both the web dev toolbar and firebug give me the compressed numbers.

If your requests are coming in with the right non-IE6 accept headers then the JavaScript files might be passing through some HTTP proxy on the way to your browser that's leaving them inflated...

Sampy said:

JoshRoss said:

*snip*

I'm only seeing 186kb of JS on this page with a hard refresh. What browser are you using?

kettch said:

wisemx said:

*snip*

You want this one

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/rss.aspx

Sometimes Scott's posts are slightly ahead of the official announcements.

Raghavendra_Mudugal said:

TommyCarlier said:

*snip*

tq; tc!