Auugghhh! Too true!

Saw this originally at CodeSqueeze!

IE 8 Beta 2 is out, and with it comes a host of new issues for web developers.

The KB Article "Some Web sites may not be displayed correctly or work correctly in Windows Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2" as it's title suggests, offers some guidance on how to deal with these issues from a developer perspective.

As I understand it, IE 8 by default runs in "Standards Mode" which will cause a fair amount of disruption for users when they surf to a page with a lot of IE 7 and previous, code.

The article listed above shows a bunch of work around methods, some dealing with changing IE 8's default handling of web sites, others that are applied at the web site itself.

Well worth a read for both users and developers.

IE 8 Beta 2 is available here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/

On a fairly regular basis the 3 right most icons in my System Tray disappear. The Battery, Volume, and Network icons, some or all, disappear.

After doing all the normal things like right clicking the start button and disabling the "hiding" of notification icons, rebooting the system, etc. I still could not resolve the issue. Then I stumbled on a blog post by Colin Cochrane which resolved the issue. Check his post out for detailed info, but the quick and dirty fix is:

Launch RegEdit and go to:

"HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion \TrayNotify"

Delete the values from the IconStreams and PastIconStreams registry keys.

Close Regedit and launch Task Manager, find and kill the explorer.exe process, the select File | New Task from the file menu and enter explorer.exe in the dialog box.

Bingo! All your icons are back!

Thanks Colin!

I read an article on Simple Talk by Bob Cramblitt that says that Red Gate software has reached an agreement with Lutz Roeder to be responsible for the future development of .NET Reflector. The same article goes on to say that Red Gate will continue to offer the tool for free.

I wonder exactly what that means, e.g. will it be a version behind that is free, or a somehow crippled version? I noticed that the article did not say the tool will continue to be free specifically, what it did say was:

The first thing we are doing is continuing to offer the software to the community for free downloading.

There are a number of programs that use verbiage like that to basically say that you can download it for free but not necessarily use it for free. And I wonder if the source code will stay available for free as well, with an Open Source license?

Should be interesting, but I am sure I speak for a majority of developers when I say that if it goes commercial it would be a real loss to the community.

If you install Ektron 7.5.2 on an IIS 7.0 server, you may encounter 500.21 errors during the processing of requests. The symptoms I saw were as shown below:

You can see that the images for the buttons were missing. My first thought was that I had a permissions issue on the assets folder. But that was not reflected in the fiddler traces I was getting.

I had set the Pipeline mode to Classic in the AppPool that the application was running under:

This sets the Pipeline mode to classic which is what I wanted. But I was getting 500.21 errors complaining about a "bad module 'ManagedPipelineHandler'"

Then the light bulbs went on! Preconditions! And sure enough, the two handlers in the web.config file that referenced ManagedPipelineHandler has empty preconditions settings.

<add name="ek*" path="*" verb="GET,HEAD,POST" type="Ektron.ASM.EkHttpDavHandler.EkDavHttpHandlerFactory" 
modules="ManagedPipelineHandler" scriptProcessor="" resourceType="Unspecified" requireAccess="Script" 
preCondition="" />
<add name="ekdav" path="*" verb="OPTIONS,PROPFIND,PUT,LOCK,UNLOCK,MOVE,COPY,GETLIB,PROPPATCH,MKCOL,DELETE,
(GETSOURCE),(HEADSOURCE),(POSTSOURCE)" type="Ektron.ASM.EkHttpDavHandler.EkDavHttpHandlerFactory" 
modules="ManagedPipelineHandler" scriptProcessor="" resourceType="Unspecified" requireAccess="Script" 
preCondition="" />

As you can see, both of the above have preCondition="" I set both to have a preCondition of integratedMode and saved the changes and instant success!

This stems from the fact that these are managed code modules, leaving preCondition blank means to use the modules in both Classic and Integrated modes. Since we are running the application in Classic pipeline mode (ISAPI Mode) it was attempting to run these modules. Changing the preCondition to integratedMode tells IIS not to use the modules unless the pipeline mode is set to integrated.

Running in Integrated mode does not seem to work either, for other reasons, most of which I have not yet figured out, but this fix allowed me to at least run the application on Vista and IIS 7.0.

Cheers,

Robert Porter