I often find myself defending Microsoft and aruging FOR software copyright and patents. Well not anymore! Microsoft have just lost one more supporter.

Unsupported Cascading Style Sheet Properties Compared with Cascading Style Sheets, Level 1

The following is a list of all the top-level cascading style sheet properties that the Cascading Stylesheet Specification, Level 1 supports, but that Word 2007 does not support. Note that Word 2007 considers unsupported cascading style sheet properties to be unknown properties.

• background-attachment
• background-image
• background-position
• background-repeat
• clear
• display
• float
• list-style-image
• list-style-position
• text-transform
• word-spacing

This is taken from this hideous document that Microsoft should be ashamed even exists, I hope the person who was made to write it immediately quit!

</rant>

Labels: hate, microsoft

Adobe have just released a load more source code as open source. A little while ago they gave the source code of their ActionScript engine to Mozilla, which will dramatically improve the performance of JavaScript in Firefox, making XUL an even more interesting platform to develop in. Now they've released the source code for the Flex compilers and debuggers.

This is certainly in response to Microsofts Silverlight. These technologies have an awful lot in common.

It's about time there was an alternative to Adobe/Macromedia in that space (I'm ignoring Java) and the competition should be healthy. But which one will prevail? Will there even be a winner? I suspect not, the whole point is that the embedded players are small, lightweight and portable, so pretty soon everyone will have both. Flex will most likely become the choice of the open source fans using LAMP/RoR backends, and Silverlight will be for the MS developers integrating with .NET. The users won't even see the difference.

I've not invested a whole lot of time in Flex, it looks very impressive and powerful though. I'm probably going to just keep an eye on Silverlight and move into using that for the shallow learning curve. Sorry flash fans!

Labels: adobe, flex, microsoft, silverlight

I just got my January update from MSDN, with the final release of Vista. I flicked through and grabbed the ISOs disk and mounted them in a Virtual PC. After an hour or so of it chugging away going through each of the 4 ISOs, it pops up asking for Disk 5. I didn't see a disk 5, so I check again, no disk 5 there. I googled and found this on the MSDN subscribers blog.

We Goofed! As I was putting together today’s blog post, an alert subscriber emailed indicating that DVD 2429.5 from the January DVD media shipments is missing the CD ISO image for Windows Vista (English) - Disc 5. We’re in the process of correcting this on our end and anticipate sending an updated disc to affected DVD subscribers in the March 2007 shipment.

Argh! That's a wasted evening, admittedly I should have just used the DVD version, not the ISO disk, but I was in a hurry.

Labels: microsoft, msdn, vista

There were four of us heading down to DDD on friday, the geeking started pretty much straight away, derek and mike spent over an hour in the back of the car creating an ad-hoc wifi network between my SPV and a tablet pc, so that they could RDP from the PDA to the PC and open the CE webserver page in IE. I know what you're thinking, that's so cool! After a few late drinks in the bar it was bed in the tiny single rooms, you'd think they were designed especially for tech conference delegates except for the serious shortage of power sockets. The very first session I went to was probably the most practical. I was aware of msbuild before and knew that VS2005 used it, but now I've seen a bit more of what you can do with it I reckon I can double our companies productivity by the end of the week ;) On Friday afternoon I had a certain desire to stick my name on the list for the grok talks, (looking at that list now I notice a few people chickened out!). I figured since it was just a 10 min thing they wouldn't expect much, I had no slides, no code samples, not even a screen shot, and I was doing a talk on image manipulation :-s The first guy had slides, the second guy had a whole routine where he was talking to a video of himself, and the next guy did a pretty funny written on cards thing ala Bob Dylan. Then it was my turn... and somehow I won best talk! The prize was an MSDN licence worth about £1500! I was a bit surprised, I'm not gonna try the total improv approach again though! Correction: As Colin just pointed out, no one chickened out, it was down to time constraints, so sorry if I upset anyone! I really wouldn't blame any new speakers for changing their minds though, it was the largest audience I've spoken infront of since at least the school play.

Labels: conference, DDD4, developer day, microsoft, msbuild

I'm heading down to reading tonight for DDD, this is the first one I've been to. I've got a rough idea of what I'm going to see for each session but there are few I can't decide on! There are 3 other guys from my company going down so between us we can go see everything then just compare notes after. I'll be going to see Sarahs web2 session, I'm sure she'll have a few good insights, plus it'll be a nice break from all the dreary architecture stuff (joke, I love it really!). I put my name down for a grok talk, I think I can talk for a few minutes about GDI+ before I run out of thoughts, I'm not really sure what'll be expected of me though or how many will turn up to listen. If you want to meet up then let me know, or if you see me about then say hi!

Labels: DDD4, developer day, microsoft, reading