Becky Bertram's Blog: Posts

IE8 Behavior and Duplicate Publishing Controls

Becky Bertram — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:18:06 GMT

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Today I ran across a strange anomaly in IE8. I thought I'd share a post about in the case that someone else runs across this issue, too.

Our page had two identical controls on it: one in an Edit Mode Panel and the other in the body of the page. I hadn't specified the ControlMode property on the Rich Image Placeholder control that wasn't in the Edit Mode Panel, because I didn't care if it showed up when the page was being edited, since I was using CSS in the Edit Model Panel to hide the div (so the page content wouldn't show up when the page was being edited.)

In other words, my scenario looked like this:

<PublishingWebControls:editmodepanel runat="server" id="EditModePanel">
<style type="text/css">
#pageContent { display: none; }
</style>
<PublishingWebControls:RichImageField runat="server" FieldName="PageImage" />
</PublishingWebControls:editmodepanel>

When running Internet Explorer 8 in Compatibility View, saving the image was no problem. However, when running in straight IE8 mode, every time I tried to save the page, the change to my image wasn't being picked up. (In other words, if I added a new image, after I saved the page, it looked like it hadn't saved the image at all. If the placeholder already had an image in it and I cleared the placeholder, after I saved the page, it looked like the image was still saved.)

Adding the ControlMode="Display" property to the placeholder control in the "pageContent" div solved the problem.

Category: Troubleshooting

Published: 11/5/2009 11:59 AM

The Cloud De-Mist-ified

Becky Bertram — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:51:57 GMT

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When my 60-some year old mother-in-law asked me what "cloud computing" was, I was suprised. Suddenly, it seemed, a buzz-word that those of us in our IT subculture had been using for a while had gone mainstream. (I remember having the same reaction when I heard a news announcer say someone was wearing "bling".)

Sometimes it's nice, though, to be reminded that terms are not so obvious to people who might not be immersed in technology day and night. I ran across a nice video and article on CNN.com that explains that "cloud" computing is not "light and fluffy", but that data "in the cloud" still sits in brick and mortar server farms somewhere, even if it's not longer on your personal hardware. Whereas this might seem like a no-brainer to us, it's true that the term "cloud" is, well, nebulous, (as nebulous as nebulous clouds!) and people don't really know where their data goes when it's saved.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/11/04/cloud.computing.hunt/index.html

The most interesting part of the article to me was this:

But the more I mulled over my failing scavenger hunt, the more I thought that maybe I was asking the wrong question. Perhaps it doesn't matter where my data is, just that there's some way for me to get a sense of how well it's managed.

Still, without information, it's hard to know who to trust.

That makes it easy to fall back on flimsy methods of comparison, like going with a brand you already know. I'm sure this is how I ended up with so much data on Google's servers. It's a huge company. Billions use their search. Tens of millions save files with Gmail. They've got to know what's up, right?

That's exactly what the big cloud companies hope you will think. Microsoft's general manager of Windows Live, Brian Hall, told me brand recognition is the best way for people to compare services.

"Consumers, they don't really care if there are 9,000 data centers or two data centers as long as they have confidence that we're going to protect their data and they'll have access to it when they want to have access to it," he said. (In case you're wondering, Hall said Microsoft has "between 10 and 100 data centers" worldwide. Really specific.)

This coincides with a discussion I had today with a co-worker about Microsoft's BPOS service. While we understand that some companies may never transition to a paid-service-in-the-cloud model because of the sensitivity of the data being stored, more and more things like e-mail and document stroage will become commodified. A commodity is something that's pretty much the same wherever you go, so the great determining factor becomes price. If even the price is similar, as the Microsoft person said in the quote above, decisions start being made on secondary factors, whether that's real value (such as better customer service) or perceived value (such as brand recognition).

It will be interesting, in the coming years, to see how the big companies can create brand loyalty around their cloud services.

Category: General

Published: 11/4/2009 1:37 PM

Virtualization Smorgasbord

Becky Bertram — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 01:43:16 GMT

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I've been a Virtual PC user for years, doing all my SharePoint development in a virtual environment. However, SharePoint 2010 only can be installed on x64 servers, and Virtual PC cannot support x64 guest systems. So, over the last week, I've experimented with a few options that could be utilized for SharePoint 2010 development in the future. (No, as cool as it is that we can develop SharePoint 2010 apps on a Windows 7 platform, I'm not interested in turning my host laptop into a development platform.)

Boot from VHD
With Windows 7, you can now boot up your computer from a .vhd file. This is sort of like using partitions in days of old, except you don't need a physical partition to make it happen. By your disk living in flat file, you can still back up your environment or share it, as with Virtual PC .vhd files.
Understanding Virtual Hard Disks with Native Boot
Windows 7 – VHD Boot – Setup Guideline

Sun VirtualBox
This is one that my buddy Mike Henthorn showed me. Although I get a shiver up and down my spine, being a Microsoft person through and through, for using a Sun product, I have to admit, that Dutch part of me likes it because it's free. (And in Sun's defense, the product is open-source.) This provides a virtual environment that supports a x64 guest OS, and can load hard drives with a .VHD extension. It even includes snapshotting.
Download VirtualBox

VMWare Workstation
VMWare has been one of the leading virtualization software providers for a long time now. I remember hearing about them long before Virtual PC was widely adopted. Their Workstation product is a workhorse. The biggest drawback is that, well, it costs something. However, compared to what many of us developers shell out on hardware, $189 doesn't seem like that much to shell out for a dependable product you'll use every day.
VMWare Workstation

Please feel free to leave me a comment, letting me know which option you prefer for your SharePoint 2010 development.

Category: General

Published: 11/1/2009 8:21 PM