Scott Hanselman describes the ASP.NET fix need to make the browser definition files work with IE10. In general we encourage developers to use feature detection when switching their mark-up but the ASP.NET infrastructure has been around for a long time. One thing to watch out for if you are doing custom browser detection is the two digit version number with IE10. We've seen a few sites have issues because they only expect a single digit and end up thinking IE10 is IE1.

Today, the W3C announced the creation of a Tracking Protection Working Group to work on defining what tracking is, signaling user intent, and tracking protection lists. The W3C’s action here can help protect consumers from unwanted tracking. We welcome the opportunity to work with the industry and governments on a Web standard based on our earlier work. [continues on the IEBlog]

This morning the W3C accepted and published Microsoft’s Web Tracking Protection member submission proposing a standard for helping to address privacy concerns related to online tracking. You can read more on the IE Blog and on the W3C Blog. Web Tracking Protection is based on IE9’s tracking protection lists showcased on the IE9 Test Drive.

I have upgraded this blog to Subtext 2.5 and moved hosting providers from WebHost4Life to Arvixe. This is a test post to make sure it is all working.

Last year I wrote about the W3C’s annual Technical Plenary and Advisory Committee (TPAC) conference. This is where most of the W3C working groups get together for a week of face to face meetings and networking. TPAC 2010 was a couple of weeks ago and here I will highlight some of the topics discussed by the groups where we participate… [continues on the IEBlog]

I want to provide an update to my last blog post about the W3C process that we follow to develop and finalise Web Standards. The working group published the Release Candidate (RC) of the CSS 2.1 Test Suite on September 17. The next step is for the major browser vendors to submit their implementation reports using the working group’s template within one month from publication of the test suite. The group has set a deadline on October 18… [continues on the IEBlog]

Complete Web Standards with multiple browser implementations and comprehensive test suites are the backbone of the interoperable Web. Getting web standards through the complete standardisation process and turned into official W3C Recommendations takes a lot of effort. While it is tempting to view the latest editor’s draft of a specification as a "standard", a large part of the complexity that ensures good interoperability happens in the "last mile". In the last couple of weeks, several key web specifications have reached important milestones and these examples illustrate how the process works… [continues on the IEBlog]

Over the last month, as part of Microsoft’s commitment to interoperability, we’ve published information for Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8 describing variations from certain web standards… [continues on the IEBlog]

There’s lots going on in the web standards world and being part of the Internet Explorer team gives me a front row seat. We’ve posted a few updates on the IE Blog relating to standards in the last few weeks:

• W3C SVG Working Group Update for January 2010
• MIX - Microsoft, W3C and SVG
• Documenting Standards in IE
• W3C HTML Working Group Publishes New Drafts
• Working with the HTML5 Community

I’m really looking forward to the feedback we get from MIX where General Manager of IE, Dean Hachamovitch, will present one of the keynote sessions and there will be a number of IE9 breakouts. Unfortunately, I won’t get a chance to be at MIX this year but I’ll be watching from afar and waiting to hear the stories my colleagues have to tell when they return.

Technorati Tags: MIX10,IE9,W3C,HTML5

We’re always excited to engage with members of the W3C including the developers of other browsers as well as the broader web development community to help shape the direction of emerging Web standards, particularly HTML5.  This includes participating in events like TPAC, which we wrote about in November, and on-going engagement with various working groups… [continues on the IEBlog]

Last week, the W3C HTML Working Group reached a decision to publish several new working drafts and these are now available. The discussion about what to publish and how to structure the HTML5 specification has taken several months. In November, at the TPAC meeting, a request was made for the Microdata section of the specification to be removed. Back in August, I posted about our support for a separate Canvas 2D API specification… [continues on the IEBlog]

This week the W3C holds its annual Technical Plenary and Advisory Committee meeting (TPAC 2009). There will be about a dozen people from the IE team participating and this is a valuable opportunity to continue working together with other W3C members on the next generation of web standards. High quality specifications that improve interoperability between browsers are important. Our goal is to help ensure these new standards work well for web developers and will work well in future versions of IE… [continues on the IEBlog]

There were a number of announcements at TechEd US last week with many status updates on forthcoming products. Bruce Kyle has written up the list on the US ISV DE blog. It’s interesting to see the ramp-up for Windows Mobile 6.5 beginning with the launch of registration for the Windows Marketplace for Mobile and an announcement of support for the latest draft of the W3C Widgets spec. In fact, there is a Windows Mobile Ramp-Up track on MSDN to facilitate learning about mobile development.

One aspect I’m particularly interested in exploring is the Windows 7 native support for the ribbon UI. This is something I’ve been investigating for a while for a side project and so I’m considering limiting myself to Windows 7 for now so I can take advantage of this control. As I understand it, the plan is to provide support for Windows Vista around the time of Windows 7 RTM.

The release of a beta of Virtual PC for Windows 7 allows Windows XP applications to run in a way that integrates them into the usual Windows desktop without it being obvious that an entire second copy of Windows is running. Virtual PC on Windows 7 requires hardware virtualisation and I was looking for a quick way to determine whether that is supported on any given PC.

SecurAble by Gibson Research Corp supports both Intel and AMD CPUs and tells you simply whether the processor is 64-bit capable, whether it supports Data Execution Prevention technology, and whether it supports hardware-assisted virtualisation.

I have an old printer. Very old. It’s an Epson EPL-5500 and I got it in about 1995/6 and it has served me well ever since. Soon I might need a new printer – soon I won’t be able to get toner cartridges for this one – but for now it is fine. It worked fine in Vista but now that I’ve decided to enter the 64-bit world with Windows 7, I need 64-bit drivers and they don’t come with Win7. After all, who still uses a printer that is more than a decade old?

My printer is connected to my Windows Home Server and I know that server operating systems have the ability to host drivers for the printers they share so that when you connect to the printer, the driver is downloaded. Using Remote Desktop to connect to WHS, there is an Additional Drivers button on the Sharing tab of the printer properties.

WHS is based on Windows Server 2003 so it doesn’t intrinsically know anything about Windows Vista or Windows 7. It does know about 64-bit Windows XP, though. By default the x64 checkbox is unchecked and the driver isn’t installed. When you check the box, you’re prompted to enter the DVD containing the driver. Unfortunately, WHS is 32-bit only so inserting the WHS DVD doesn’t help. I found a copy of Windows Server 2003 64-bit on an old MSDN DVD and used that to provide a copy of the 64-bit driver. This gives me a ‘Yes’ in the Additional Drivers dialog and now I can connect to the printer from Windows 7. When I do, Windows prompts me to elevate permissions so that the driver can be installed and all is well.

Windows Home Server to the rescue again (sort of) and now all my Windows 7 PC’s will be able to print again.

Yesterday, a note was posted on the IE blog about the “hang recovery” feature in IE8 on Windows 7. During testing, it was found that the timer used to determine if a tab in IE is not being responsive was found to be a little too sensitive on some people’s computers, especially while using the built-in developer tools.

Today, two updates for IE8 on Win7 RC are available through Windows Update. The first is the expected “compatibility list”. Since IE8 (and Windows 7) ship with an empty compatibility list, one needs to be downloaded after first install. The second update is one to mitigate the issue of seeing the “webpage is not responding” dialog too frequently. The updates are both rated “Important” and it’s recommended that you install both updates.

Yesterday, I started experimenting with building a simple application using the .NET Compact Framework v3.5 and Visual Studio 2008. It was pretty simple to get running using the emulator after downloading and installing the Windows Mobile 6 SDKs (make sure you get the Refresh).

As part of the SDK install, you are reminded that you will need to install the Windows Mobile Device Center (WMDC) application in order to connect to a real device. Since I am running Win7 RC, I was a little nervous about this. I remember trying to install ActiveSync on Vista and getting in a mess before discovering you needed WMDC instead. I assumed that Win7 would come with WMDC but since the SDK couldn’t see it I gambled and installed anyway.

After getting a simple application running with the emulator, I decided to try it on a real device. Connecting my phone with a USB cable, I ended up with Win7 detecting and then losing the connection and then re-detecting over and over every few seconds. I am not sure what went wrong but I guessed that maybe installing WMDC had been a mistake so I tried uninstalling and then reconnecting the phone. This time the driver for the phone downloading from Windows Update stalled.

I found a post on the TechNet forums from someone at Microsoft describing a driver install issue with Windows Mobile and the Win7 Beta. Although I would have expected this issue to be resolved by now, following the instructions to remove the RNDIS driver and then re-installing WMDC did the trick and on the third attempt the phone was detected and the drivers correctly downloaded and installed.

I’m not sure exactly what the problem was and I hope that either I was just unlucky or that this issue is resolved before Win7 ships. Now that I can connect to the phone from Visual Studio, the next step is to deploy my test app and ensure it works on the device.

Update 8 May: Today, I just plugged my phone into a different Win7 machine and it automatically went off and downloaded everything it needed including Windows Mobile Device Center and everything just worked. I guess I went wrong before by trying to preempt what software I needed to install based on the SDK messages. Just plugging in the phone would have given me what I needed.

I’ve been running builds of Win7 on my 1525 for some time after doing an in-place upgrade from Vista 32-bit to the Win7 Beta. We recently announced that we won’t support build to build upgrades from Win7 Beta to Win7 RC (which will be available to MSDN/TechNet subscribers tomorrow) I could either revert to Vista and do another upgrade or install from scratch. I decided to take the opportunity to move to 64-bit and since that’s not possible when doing an upgrade from 32-bit Vista I installed from scratch. Although all the hardware was successfully detected, this left me without some of the Dell utilities including things like the Wi-Fi sniffer and full scrolling support from the Trackpad driver.

There’s a useful post on the TechNet forums about which drivers to use on a Dell Inspiron 1525 if you want to upgrade from 32-bit Vista to 64-bit Vista or Win7 and this helped get me up and running. It turns out that some of the 64-bit drivers aren’t listed for the 1525 but address the same hardware on other Dell machines and so work just fine.

I like to have a couple of desktop clock gadgets so that I can see the time in different time zones without having to think about it. A while ago I found a gadget that I like but there are lots of clocks in the Windows Live Gallery and so I’m never sure if I’m picking the same one when I install on a new machine. Sure, I could copy the file locally and make sure I just install that each time but that pre-supposes that I have access to the copy when I need it. Instead, I’m going to bookmark it here and then I know how to find my way back. It’s the Digital World Clock – thanks SARWAR.

The Visual Studio and Internet Explorer teams discovered an issue affecting some of the code wizards in Visual Studio after installing IE8. Visual Studio hosts the browser control to implement the code wizards and the custom security manager that is part of VS doesn’t expect a request from IE about an URLACTION that wasn’t previously routed through the security manager.

The Visual Studio team have posted a workaround on their blog.