Apart from the tools we’re used to, here a couple new ones:

• Javascript debugging works! There is also the console window (which the likes of FireFox has had for a while), allowing you to print trace information from your javascript code. This is much better than using alert boxes!
• There is now a Profiler as well, allowing you to see function call times as well as examine the call tree. Very useful for building AJAX based sites.
• You can test Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) compatibility. The tool allow you to change the Browser Mode and Document Mode between IE7, 8 and Quirks mode, so no need to have a VM just to work with IE7. For final QA testing however, I’d recommend using a real IE7 version.

So what’s to be prepared about? IE8 is more  ‘standards compliant’ than previous versions, meaning that your website may not look or even work exactly as you intend in the new browser! To update a web-site’s design to be standards compliant can be time consuming, especially seen as you may have only just got through updating to support IE7!!

Microsoft thought about this and so offers the ability to select a version of internet explorer that your site supports.

By default, the browser will be in “Internet Explorer 8 Standards” mode. For non-compatible sites, users will see a broken page icon in the address bar. Clicking on this will allow them to change the compatibility to Internet Explorer 7, for example. You don’t want your site visitors to have to do this, so as a site owner, you can specify what you support.

This is done with a meta tag, in the head of your web pages. The following will set a page to render in IE8, the same as it would in IE7:

<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=EmulateIE7″>

That’s it!

Full details on other possible document compatibility values can be found at MSDN – Defining Document Compatibility

The Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit also highlights other features to be aware of as a developer. It makes interesting reading.

It has been a long time in Beta and as such I have stayed away from it until the last couple of weeks. There are enough new products released from Microsoft to keep me busy without getting bogged down in beta’s!

So in the last couple of weeks I have been learning ASP.NET MVC after discovering that the final release was imminent and I have to admit that I am very impressed. The first and foremost difference would be that there is no longer the same postback lifecycle and no ViewState, which means pages are very fast (yay)! The level of control you have over the final HTML is akin to the old days of classic ASP or PHP, but still with all the .NET goodies to make life easier. After spending so long in Web Forms, it is quite strange (but a nice strange) to look at the HTML source and see plain, concise markup.

I’ve found the best learning source to be the tutorials provided on the official ASP.NET MVC site and also the first chapter of the new Wrox book which is available for free from Scott Guthrie. As with everything there are no shortcuts and there is a lot to learn, but if you are comfortable with the web platform in general, then the learning curve is not that steep at all.

To learn something well you need to create a sample project.  I always create a simple task management tool so that I get a nice comparison between technologies. What I found was that to AJAX-enable the site was a lot more straight forward than using the Web Forms approach – the end result was cleaner and the whole MVC approach leans itself totally to the AJAX approach.

All in all, well worth learning.

So how to do it? Well, it takes some javascript, but to ensure that it works across all browsers, is a few lines longer than you may be expecting. The post here from Digital Inspiration has a full example that (with a few tweaks) will work on all browsers.

The crux of it is:

• For IE use - window.external.AddFavorite(location.href, document.title);
• For Firefox use – window.sidebar.addPanel(location.href, document.title,”");

So what’s the added benefit of this? With a little extra programming, you can now monitor and log how many people have added your site to their browser bookmarks, something you couldn’t do otherwise. Now that’s a great way to know what’s hot and what’s not, especially on content based sites!

Add a line similar to the one below, into your html head contents:

<link href=”http://www.pureblue.wordpress.com/rss” rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”Pure Blue – .NET and other things” />

All compatible browsers will now highlight the feed! 

The issue surfaces when you try and invoke a button click on an input element of type “submit” through javascript. Simply use myButton.click()you say? Well, unfortunately no. It can be the case that the click appears to work in terms of invoking any other javascript that might be attached to that event, but it actually does not invoke the postback to the server. The button works perfectly when use the mouse, but just doesn’t work with the click() method.

So the solution is to fake the button being clicked with the mouse when in firefox, and otherwise to just use what you’d expect:

if (button.dispatchEvent)
{
var e = document.createEvent(“MouseEvents”);
e.initEvent(“click”, true, true);
button.dispatchEvent(e);
}
else
{
button.click();
}

http://wiki.asp.net/

Most of the early content is from Scott Hanselman, but if the uptake is good, it promises to be a good focal point for those “how-to’s” that you often have to scour blogs to find.

http://www.linqpad.net/

There’s support for LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Objects and LINQ to Xml, so it has it all.

For me, the best part is that when you’re building your query, you get that instant feedback on your results. Better still, you can view the results of your query in SQL! For old Sql hats like myself, this is quite comforting

http://it-box.blogturk.net/2007/10/19/linq-to-sql-tutorial-series-by-scott-guthrie-pdf-book-format/

It’s easy reading, highlighting each aspect of LINQ To Sql: how it works; how to customize it; and where best to use it. When reading ‘cover-to-cover’ you can see there is a fair chuck of repetition in between the sections, but then that just helps it work well as a quick reference guide.  LINQ To Sql itself is going to vastly improve my current development projects, especially with it’s simple ability to page efficiently over large amounts of data (a hassle to do in Sql once you factor in what column you are ordering by).

A good solution is to style anchor tags to look and feel like a button. An awesome example can be found at Oscar Alexander’s blog, using CSS techniques to alter the background images. It’s well worth a look.