On my box affectionately know as sub-prime, ie8 shows me that the wordy tab instructions of ie7 has been replaced, but only with web 2.0ish gradient language telling me the obvious, “you’ve opened a tab”. This weak phrasing reminds me of the oldie but not so goodie aol phrase turned movie, “you’ve got mail”. Sorry IE8 team, but this is pathetic. Both ie7 and ie8 do not give me anything useful when I hit ctrl+t.

I am going to skip over firefox and delve right into opera because firefox is even worse than ie in that ctrl+t simply gives me a blank address bar and blank page. No instructions nothing useful. Simple, yes, useful, no. In this case the KIMAC has not been met.

My superb memory, ha ha, has faltered since I’m not exactly sure how I came across Opera again, but somehow I heard an interview with one of the oldest players in the browser space and downloaded their operamini to my phone. In general it had a nice feel to it so I recently decided to stuff the pipes of the old laptop with yet another program and download the latest opera. For the most part it has been a good experience. Its tab implementation absolutely rocks.

Opera is on the forefront of the tab. They have a feature called speed dial, invoking the paradigm from a phone where when you instantiate a new tab, ctrl+t, rather than being presented with a blank page like in firefox, or a page which explains tabs (only useful once), opera gives you a 3×3 grid of thumbnails with which you can add your favorite sites. Like a mini favorites/bookmarker it allows you to throw in a reasonable number, nine, sites you might use. The paradigm is easy for non-techies, the number of options is kept manageable and the thumbnails give you visual cues for easy nav. I love this feature.

Click here for a side-by-side comparison of the implementations.

The second tab feature of note is a thumbnail of your other tabs. We have seen this on other sites, such as ask.com, and on the windows powertoy alt+tab switcher, but opera incorporates a thumbnail of the webpage into the hover state on other tabs. This gives you a nice preview of non-focused tabs in a mouse-friendly way, if you are not a master ctrl+tab switcher.

Click here for a view of the thumbnailing feature.

I have had a few crashes most notably when trying to add cookinglight.com to the speeddial, but overall it has taken over as my default browser for everything but web development. There are probably ways to manage this better, but ff has become clogged with development tools, firebug, webdev toolbar, yslow etc that impede on my general surfing not to mention the memory creep.

Question 1 - Do you manipulate, muck up, mess with the machine config?
I have been burnt by the GAC before <future post/> so I tend to deploy my apps with everything they need right in the bin and app folders. This means I a bit less tidiness, having have extra dlls in my bin and that I make most tweaks in my app web.config but has the benefit of easy deployment. Deployment is not the time you want to be messing with settings!

A recent post I came across from ScottGu’s blog linked to this article, Top 10 Best Practices for Production asp net Applications. I have read similarly titled articles in the past so I went here on a lark, expecting to find nothing new, but I was pleasantly surprised. The number one new tidbit was, “Set retail=’true’ in your machine.config”. Never heard of that before, but if true it does a hat trick:

This will kill three birds with one stone. It will force the ‘debug’ flag in the web.config to be false, it will disable page output tracing, and it will force the custom error page to be shown to remote users rather than the actual exception or error message. For more information you can read Scott Guthrie’s post or the MSDN reference.

I have to test it out, but I wish I had known about it years ago when I worked in a shop with very loose deployment controls. Developers were constantly leaving crumbs on my freshly vacuumed carpet, page level trace=”true” statements. Once tested I’ll then have to figure out how to role out machine.config changes to a web farm since my current company is freakishly spendthrift with the servers.

Question 2 - Do you deploy source code?
In a compiled language such as java or c#, do you deploy source code? My only real working knowledge is in c# so I’ll stick to that domain for now. This question arises as I have some java guys on the team who want to push .cs files to the server to have the “ability to patch code”. For me this smells like a glade plug-in, the scent while nauseating is really covering up the stank of bad source control management.

Fortunately google comes to the rescue as a search for for “deploying source code” gave me this first read from a relatively good source, aspnetresources.

The whitepaper also lists JIT compilation, but I won’t go there. It’s a questionable approach which is outside of the scope of this article. Please, refer to Chapter 4 of the whitepaper, “Deployment Issues for .NET Applications”, to read more about NGEN and JIT compilation.

The white paper mentioned is this, Deploying .NET Framework-based Applications at Patterns & Practices, which is a better source, but the paper is a bit dated being published in 2003. After a quick read that did not really give me anything useful.

After changing search terms, “deploying .cs files”. The first thread, mentions publishing .cs files, but not a single person says they do it. They mostly hawk the web deployment project and/or the web application project, which is of course what I’m already selling.

Dr. Peter A. Bromberg, creator of eggheadcafe says, “I wouldn’t even consider deploying .cs files”. - eggheadcafe

Having read the esteemed Dr Bromberg a few times over the years, that quote is good enough for me, but I am still searching for the article that explains the pros of deploying source. Let me know if you find it and make sure it is a reputable source too.

To top it off here’s my favorite qoute from Jason, invoking a bit of Amy Whinehouse,
“NO NO NO… when you ‘patch’ you create and unpredictable hybrid release that isn’t really anything.”

Only today did I fully realize that when you change a wordpress theme you change the header and footer files as well. To an asp.net guy a theme is a smaller more design oriented concept. For wordpress, a theme encompasses the entire css, js and php code for the site. Any custom code I had added in is gone. Doh! Bye-bye link to stylesheet, all done google analytics code, see you later ad words tweaks.

I put these items back into the theme, and decided to add the following mods to upgrade the the posting experience:

1. css opacity on hover
2. js code to throw in target=”_blank” on all external links

Check out the sample I setup here. If you view source on the html you will see link 3 has target=”_blank” defined already while link 4 does not. If you view the html post js processing, in firebug of course, you will see the target attribute added to the 4th link.

Do you have any custom code you’ve added to your blog for easilbity?

ref: IBM’s Selenium and Test NG | random examples | core reference | peter krantz’s selenium and asp.net |