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I've been working on a small project all day, and I noticed after an hour or so, my machine was running considerably slower. IE was responding fine, but FireFox was dragging its self around. I checked the memory usage, and FF2 was 300,000+!!! IE was a strong ~30,000, so I was a bit confused. Both browsers had the same page opened, but FF was freaking consuming ridiculous amounts of memory, so I decided to investigate. Looks like FF2 increases its memory usage everytime you refresh a page - even if the page is in cache. IE keeps its memory usage pretty stable. I decided to test 4 popular browsers with a single page and see how they do after 5 refreshes (most web-designer/developers do some serious refreshing all day long). Browser Starting Refresh 1 Refresh 2 Refresh 3 Refresh 4 Refresh 5 Firefox2 31,536k 38,432k 41,912k 47,068k 51,564k 56,700k Internet Explorer 7 29,316k 30,244k 29,552k 30,356k 29,752k 30,212k Safari for Windows 31,408k 34,036k 34,624k 34,880k 35,588k 36,132k Opera 9 24,356k 28,788k 28,924k 29,020k 29,020k 29,116k More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

With the release of IE8 Beta 1, I'm pleased to be able to talk about the first round of improved standards compliance and bug fixes in IE's HTML and DOM support for the new IE8 standards mode. Doug hinted at some of these improvements, and I wrote a little bit about them in the IE8 Beta 1 whitepapers here and here. In this post, I'd like to enumerate the 'change list' (of sorts) here on the blog in response to requests for such a list that I received at MIX08. Personally, I've been long-awaiting this release because of what I know it means to web developers (like myself) that have had to code around a lot of IE's DOM quirks for many years. For IE8, I have really focused on the HTML and DOM Core standards and concentrated on building a solid cross-browser compatible foundation for many of the APIs that are already supported by Trident. This effort to fix some of the cracks in IE's foundation has been a long time in coming, and I believe it's a critical and necessary first step before adding on additional standards support. For IE8 Beta1, we looked at many community-provided bug reports and found that the top pain-points were related to IE's attribute handling (with a few prominent exceptions like getElementById). Therefore, attribute-handling has served as the 'theme' for the set of issues to tackle in IE8. We probably won't be able to fix all of the community-reported bugs in the DOM in this release (there are many), but we want to make sure that we get to the worst offenders first. Help us out by submitting or voting on the bugs that you feel are most impactful to your business. HTML/DOM Standards Compliance in IE8 Beta 1 Note: I use HTML5 nomenclature for DOM attribute/content attribute. Big-impact improvements in Beta 1 Within the scope of attribute-related fixes, the following address some of the well-known, oft-cited, compliance issues in IE's HTML and DOM support. type attribute defaults to 'submit' rather than 'button' in IE8 standards mode. setAttribute now uses the content attribute name (rather than the DOM attribute name) for applying an attribute value (also camelCase no longer required). This fixes the commonly reported issues regarding the 'style', 'class', and 'for' attributes not working. [*]getElementById finds only elements with matching id (not name) and performs case-sensitive matching. [*] value attribute text now submitted iin form submit in IE8 standards mode. IE7 standards mode continues to submit the innerText. [*] now supports native image loading (see the whitepaper for more details). [*] now supports fallback for two additional scenarios: HTML embedding and native image loading (where the HTML/image resource cannot be loaded, i.e., 4xx-5xx HTTP response codes. ActiveX controls still do not support fallback (see the whitepaper for more details). [*]URL-type DOM attributes separated from content attributes. For example: .href (DOM attribute) != .getAttribute('href') (content attribute). You will find that all URL-type DOM attributes return an absolute URL, while the content attribute returns the string that was provided in the source. These changes apply to the Attr.value and getAttributeNode as well. Specifically: The following element's DOM attributes now return absolute URLs: applet [codebase], base [href], body , del [cite], form [action], frame [src, longdesc], head [profile], iframe [src, longdesc], img [longdesc], ins [cite], link [href], object [codebase, data], q [cite], script [src]. The following element's content attributes now return relative URLs: a [href], area [href], img [src], input [src]. Consistency and reliability with Standards and other browsers (attribute-related) in Beta 1 Many reported (and some not-reported) issues with IE's attribute handling involve the NamedNodeMap interface object (object.attributes), correct DOM attribute reflection of content attributes, and case-sensitivity. In principle, the standards indicate that HTML documents are case-insensitive, while DOM Core-related APIs are case-sensing--they depend on the underlying document rules to determine their sensitivity. To resolve ambiguities, I appealed to the most common behavior of other browsers. .attributes.getNamedItem no longer creates Attr objects that don't exist in the collection (returns null when an attribute is not found). Radio button fixes: Dynamically setting the 'name' attribute on a radio button now correctly applies that radio to same named group (old known-issue fixed in Quirks, IE7, and IE8 standards modes). Radio buttons without a name attribute can now be selected by the user in IE8 standards mode (I found it interesting that the code revealed this to be an old Netscape compatibility issue). [*] enctype DOM attribute now supported. Reflects the enctype content attribute. [*]Checkbox fixes: Inserting checkboxes into the tree (and moving them around the document) no longer resets the 'checked' state with the 'defaultChecked' state. The 'defaultChecked' DOM attribute now reflects the 'checked' content attribute. The 'checked' DOM attribute affects both the intrinsic behavior on screen and the form's submitted value. Parsing operations on the 'checked' content attribute always affect both the 'checked' and 'defaultChecked' DOM attributes. (For example, removeAttribute('checked') sets 'checked' and 'defaultChecked' to false, setAttribute('checked', 'checked') sets both DOM attributes to true (as if the element were being re-parsed). [*]getAttributeNode now correctly populates the .value property of the returned Attr object for all attributes (whether .specified=true or not). [*]removeAttribute now uses case-insensitive comparisons. [*] element now closes when is encountered (ACID 2 compliance). [*] rel content attribute now finds 'alternate' token in any location in the string (ACID 2 compliance). Additional compliance and feature completion in Beta 1 href no longer applies a 'new' document base if the supplied URL is a relative URL (relative URL being defined as not having a schema ['http:'] and a hostname ['/' or 'domain']). Title attribute now preferred (over alt) when specified as the popup tooltip for images and maps (img, input, object, and area elements). When retrieving Boolean attributes by name, the value is now correctly reported as the canonical attribute name (e.g., checked='checked'). Implemented hasAttribute (case insensitive matching) which is the suggested workaround while the NamedNodeMap is under construction. Completed the Attr interface (of DOM L2 Core) by implementing ownerElement. Completed the interfaces for object, iframe, and frame (DOM L2 HTML), by implementing contentDocument. Note: like contentWindow, this property will not allow cross-domain access to the inner content. HTMLCollection fixes: 'item' API is no longer overloaded to accept strings and act like 'namedItem'. 'item' now only accepts numerical indexes (or tries to convert a string to a numerical index as is JavaScript behavior). 'namedItem' no longer returns collections if more than one named item is found. Instead, the first matching (case-insensitive) element is returned. As IE8 does not implement all collections using the HTMLCollection interface, the following exceptions currently exist: elements [htmlFormElement], rows/tbodies [htmlTableElement], rows [htmlTableSectionElement], and cells [htmlTableRowElement]. Known Issues A significant bug in our JavaScript invoke code path in IE8 Beta 1, causes some JavaScript calls to inadvertently revert to IE7 compatibility mode and therefore make it appear as if some of the aforementioned bugs are not actually fixed. :( This has personally affected some of my tests that pass DOM objects (like HTMLCollections) through a function parameter for testing--I mention this only by way of example. While you will see this bug fixed in Beta2, it may indirectly impact your own testing--I recommend checking for the existence of document.querySelector to see if your script execution has reverted to IE7 compatibility mode before concluding that IE8 Beta1 has not fixed a particular bug (the Selectors API is only visible to IE8 standards mode). Known issues we are planning to address in Beta 2 At a minimum, all previously available functionality in the DOM will be restored in Beta 2. setAttribute still does not work with event handlers. .attributes.length fails. The IE8 NamedNodeMap object is in the middle of an overhaul. Many TABLE-related API are 'not implemented' as of Beta1. As critical pieces of the IE8 layout engine come online, these APIs are being re-enabled: rows/tbodies [htmlTableElement], rows [htmlTableSectionElement], cells [htmlTableRowElement]. [*] elements don't fall back on cross-domain security failures. Known issues we are not planning to change in IE8 is not parsed in a cross-browser compatible way (parsing stops at the OBJECT, whereas other browsers continue parsing all the fallback content and make it available. No support for this parsing behavior is planned for IE8; I'll take this opportunity to ask for real-world scenarios that can help me prioritize this feature. elements cannot be 'reactivated' by dynamically correcting the attributes that caused the original fallback. Again, your feedback on the potential benefits/use-cases for this feature appreciated. Acknowledgements I'd like to acknowledge the amazing work done by all the IE developers and testers that make it possible to push a button and get IE7 compatible behavior for each of these significant changes. Also, special thanks to PPK for updating his compatibility tables to showcase some of the work that we've done. And there's more to come. Regards, Travis Leithead Program Manager IE8 Object Model http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=8375505 More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Three different hackers found 'Pwn To Own' bug Computerworld, MA - 1 hour ago By Gregg Keizer April 10, 2008 (Computerworld) The Flash vulnerability used to hijack a Windows Vista laptop during last month's "PWN To OWN" hacker ... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

- Is there a way to consolidate pc design even further? - We can see from vista driver era - things need to be tighter controled? - is there a way ms could offer a base machine - a real one - and make oems carry it? The Microsoft Computer. MS doesnt sell it.* OEM's continue to offer there own machines. BUT - all oems - in order to sell computers with windows - have to offer the microsft pc - in addition to their own offerings? I know above is unlikely, improbable and hard... but how else could ms make a computer.. like Zune. Like xbox.* the ms pc.* the real one? Obviously they cant just buy Dell - then stop licencing windows.. although maybe that's one ..drastic road.. im only wondering if there is a way - still using oems / to have a microsoft pc... logo and everything.* all of them the same.* designed by ms.* tested and verified to work flawlessly by ms id buy one. ? More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

Im using the MSDN x64 Vista ultimate image to test software, If i run the Problem Reports & Solutions tool its tells me to "Upgrade to the latest retail version" and then " Upgrade to the latest retail version of Windows Vista The problem was caused by Windows Vista, which was created by Microsoft Corporation. You are running a beta version of Windows Vista, which is no longer supported by Microsoft Corporation." Has anyone else seen this? More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Three different hackers found 'Pwn To Own' bug Computerworld, MA - 31 minutes ago By Gregg Keizer April 10, 2008 (Computerworld) The Flash vulnerability used to hijack a Windows Vista laptop during last month's "PWN To OWN" hacker ... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Microsoft Previews Windows Search 4.0 eWeek, NY - 21 hours ago ... was released to manufacturing—many of those bugs were reported by you," Nick White, a product manager, said in a post on the Windows Vista team blog. ... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> SAS storage on a Windows Vista desktop Search Storage - 3 minutes ago Scroll all the way down for some notes on Vista x64. * I know this is a storage-oriented blog .. but .. this process drove me so far up a wall I needed a ... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

ASP.Net 3.5 Extensions http://blip.tv/file/get/Eagle-ASPNet35Extensions186.wmv.jpg Click To Play Click to Play in Flash Scott Hanselman gave*the Keynote at* Devscovery*NYC on April 1, 2008 Scott called the talk I am ASP.Net 3.5 Extensions and so can You! and because it lasted about an hour and a half I edited it into three parts. See the final episode and if you missed it here is the intro. More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

Ever heard a song that you could play on repeat for hours and not get sick of? http://www.tindeck.com/audio/filestore/c/cbyr-Victims_of_Science_-_The_Device_Has_Been_Modified.mp3 More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

Dan Reed is Microsoft's Director of Scalable/Multi-Core Systems Research and head of the recently formed Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers (UPCRC): one at the University of California at Berkeley (UC-Berkeley) and a second at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Since we focus a great deal on the Cocurrency and Parallelism Revolution here on C9 we figured Dan would be another great technical guru to talk about Multi/Many-Core's impact of the future of general purpose computing. The angle of this conversation focuses attention on the server-side parallelism story which is distinct from the client problem (as addressed deeply and eloquently by Burton Smith here). Certainly the Cloud, as it were, must be scalable and highly performant in the parallel age of Many-Core. What are some of the challenges on the server side with respect to concurrent processing? Clustered server environments have traditionally been very good at parallel computation (compared to the general purpose client) so what's Dan and Microsoft working on to ensure our Cloud scales to Many-Core? Dan has a very interesting biography: "Previously, I was the founding director of the Renaissiance Computing Institute (RENCI) at the University of North Carolina, the Chancellor's Eminent Professor, and Senior Advisor for Strategy and Innovation. Before that, I was head of the Department of Computer Science, Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor, and Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. I am also a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) and chair of the Computing Research Association (CRA)" Dan was the Director of NCSA during the birth of browser Mosaic which changed the way people interact with the Internet forever... We talk about where the web is today (including browsers) versus what Mosaic enabled when it arrived. Enjoy. This is another great discussion with a supercomputing stalwart whose main focus these days in ensuring we are prepared for the highly parallel future of general purpose computation in the sky. Low res file here. Listen to the podcast(MP3) Listen to the podcast(WMA) Download the Video Watch the Video More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

HI, I just converted a VS 2005 web app that uses*the Crystal Reports 11.5 assemblies*to the .net 3.5*framework. Everything*works well from a functional*perspective, but*the VS 2008 IDE seems to*be a bit quirky.**If I make a change to the aspx page,*references to*the older (version 10.5) Crystal assemblies are generated in the web.config file. Hence ever time I make a change to*the web page I have to delete these entries from the web.config file before*compiling.......very annoying. Does anyone know if there is a configuration switch that prevents VS from forcing the insertion of these*references? WAA More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

For those who remember the digital fireplace, the kitchen island or the faux kitchen counter ive posted in past*.. I am doing another "home project" this weekend - which is a butcher block top for aformentioned island. * this is just in the spirt of ikea mashups so its not MS specific = stop reading now if you are not interested. OK - so the island thing worked out well except for one thing - the lip doesnt go out far enough for chairs to slide under - so i wanted to buy a butcher block - top - that would provide the lip for chairs to slide under - as well as add another 2 inches of hieght to the island (for cutting/prepping) Only problem was... have you see what they charge for 4 ft x 4 ft butcher blocks?* close to 1k! so... my experiment starts with a:*2 x 2 x 8 lumber @ $1.90 ea I grabbed 17 of them - and had cut into 4 ft lengths. My plan is to glue them altogether, attach supports under neath (screwed in) then sand the top really well, stain and varnish. IF this does indeed work... then I will have made a buther block top for 30$ if it does not work - im out 30$ so... Ill be posting over the*next few days*my progress... so far - i have the wood and am about to start gluing - The 2 x 2's http://www.channel9.ca/block1.jpg postioned in a row... http://www.channel9.ca/block2.jpg Quick check - just sitting on table - unglued / unsanded / unstained / unvarnished http://www.channel9.ca/block3.jpg Picture 4 more 2x2's on each side (to create lip) Do you think it will work?** * i am hoping it will! :) More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

:P The IE Automatic Component Activation (IE ACA) update is now available as part of the April 2008 Internet Explorer Cumulative Update. The "click to activate" behavior, formerly required for ActiveX controls embedded in some webpages, is now permanently removed from Internet Explorer.* For detailed information on IE ACA, see our blog post from last November announcing this update. http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/04/08/ie-automatic-component-activation-now-available.aspx More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Are You Taking Advantage of Web 2.0? New York Times Blogs, NY - 41 minutes ago Another example: When Microsoft was developing Windows Vista, it actually permitted its programmers to blog about their progress. There was a security blog, ... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

As the MVPs descend upon Redmond I am spending Wednesday mooching around (no security sessions), thought I might try to track you down and wave .... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

so, you can't import Excel 2007 spreadsheets into SQL 2005at least not as an excel speadsheet.....I mean, you can save it as 2003 compatible, blah blah blah but you lose functionality and it's just a pain in the (I need to watch my language). hmmm, that's just annoying, I'm sure its fixed in SQL 08, anyone know? More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Five reasons why GS/OS beats Vista and OS X Computerworld, MA - 1 hour ago Everyone is tossing their favorite operating system into the ring: Mac OS X, Linux, Windows Vista, Windows XP. But our recent OS smackdown overlooked my ... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Five reasons why GS/OS beats Vista and OS X Computerworld, MA - 28 minutes ago Everyone is tossing their favorite operating system into the ring: Mac OS X, Linux, Windows Vista, Windows XP. But our recent OS smackdown overlooked my ... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

I recently upgraded to Vista x64.* There are a few apps that have 64 bit equivalents, but most of what I've installed has been 32bit apps.* My question is why bother writing for 64 bit?* This question obviously doesn't apply to an app like SQL Server where it would use more than 4GB of ram.* I'm talking more for stuff like Firefox. Here's a project that's trying to port Firefox to x64.* I'm curious as to what's the benefit?* The 32bit version seems to be running just fine on Vista 64.* Is there some performance benefit you should see with 64 bit apps on x64 over 32 bit apps on x64? More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

Hello you all, I would like to create a special button that inherit from Button in c#. This button has a special behavior, that's why I just can't apply a template on it. So, I created my SpecialButton class, wrote the code and inserted it in my window... Doing this, I expected that the SpecialButton will adopt its "mother" 's style. But the SpecialButton does not want to hear anything it does not inherit its mother style. I believe that it is due to the fact that I defined a style for {x:Type Button}. How can I say to my special button that for the style he IS a Button??? I hope that my explanations are clear enough:s. Thanks. N3mr0d More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

Today has downloaded a wma form music. .Initially listens. .The timbre was much better compared to the mp3 form. . .I thought that Microsoft should operate the source wma encoder using the superiority, lets the more equipment supports. .With cross platform. . .Was really too good.microsoft wma music storm. This is uses microsoft live translator by Chinese simplified form machine translation English.:) More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Vista SP1 reboot bug fixed, downloads to resume techworld.nl, Netherlands - 27 minutes ago The Vista Servicing Stack Update (SSU) was a prerequisite for installing Vista SP1 via Windows Update that was made available by Microsoft in February. ... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

oops - sorry, please ignore (posting problem!) More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

Hi. I’m new when it comes to C# and have some problems with a application I’m developing.* The scenario is as follows: I want to copy all new files from a directory on our network to the hard drive. Here’s the kicker… *The program will be running from the network drive. The user navigates to the network drive and run my app that copies all the new files in that directory to a specified location on their computer. I got a lot of tips this post: from http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=340403The problem is that the line marked problem generates a SecurityExeption. The code looks something like this. public FileCopy(string targetPath) { ****** try ****** { ***********//sorcefiler ********** DirectoryInfo sourceDir = new DirectoryInfo(“.”) ********** //Target files ***********DirectoryInfo targetDir = new DirectoryInfo(targetPath);//PROBLEM ******* } ******* catch (Exception e) ******* { ********** MessageBox.Show(e.Message, "Unexpected exception", MessageBoxButtons.OK); *********** return; ******* } ********** //copy new files ***********this.copyNewFiles(sourceDir, targetDir); ********** //Startar programmet ********** this.startProgram(targetPath); ******* } static void Main(string[] args) { *** FileCopy files = new FileCopy(arg.Replace("L=", "")); } The exeption: “Request for the permission of type 'System.Security.Permissions.FileIOPermission, mscorlib, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral' failed. … The action that faild was: Demand The type of the first permission that faild was: System.Security.Permission.FileIOPermission The zone of the assembly that faild was Intranet” Any ideas how to fix it without changing permissions in .NET Framework 2.0 Configuration? More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds