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I’ve been reading various news stories about IE8 on Ajaxian. So I know IE8 is in development, somehow I didn’t quite catched the news that IE8 beta is actually out! until I was looking at some google anayltics stats on browsers today and found some people coming on my sites using IE8…

Well now I’ve installed IE8 on a VM. My first reaction after I’ve installed it, is simply jaw-droppingly-remarkable. I look in horror as all the sites that I’ve made failed under IE8.

Everybody has been touting IE8’s ability to be truely standards compliant. Which adds to an even more deepened sense of depression when I realise the sites I’ve been making - the css techniques and experiences that I’ve gathered in the past 7 years… have failed me.

I admit - I never actually sat down and look through the HTML and CSS specs, that doesn’t mean I’m clueless - in fact, I’ve been pretty good at keeping just 1 stylesheet across all browsers - didn’t even have to use browser specific stylesheets. All these gained through trial and error, experimentations and experience.

So have I really got to go now to read through the standards documents and specs?

Luckily I won’t have to as I can simply tell IE8 to render as IE7.
Here is the official link from MS: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288325(VS.85).aspx

I won’t get too depressed, until I see the release candidate, as not suprisingly, pretty much every site I’ve come across on the internet doesn’t look correct under IE8. Can we hope that it is simply a matter of time these issues are addressed?

Or is MS’s IE8 plan simply to make it strictly standards compliant and not implement any backwards and additional compatibility that has existed in all previous versions and competitor’s browser just to “please”/”aggrevate” the whiny standards compliancy developer crowd? - If that’s the case - IE8 is a lost cause - which will simply function as IE7 for most sites and the standards compliancy that it has been boosting is simply a comeback at the critics of MS.

Still a new version is better than stalling on IE7, as we developers really need people to upgrade from IE6. The introduction of a newer version would hopefully shift the balance and we can begin to see IE6 being phased out just as IE5.5 has.

Later.

So I’ve been doing some Flash development lately, and I’ve spent over 4 days researching the best method of creating a CMS Flash website that is renewable.

Once of the things I’m really keen even when I’m doing normal web development is to minimise loading time and improve user experience. I found that there are methods to share common libraries in Flash, unfortunately most of the documentations lately have been focused in Flex.

For various reasons I’m not going to purchase Flex to develop this project. I hate how Adobe have split Flash into Flash CS3 IDE and Flex but I’ll come back to this another time.

Anyway, as I was saying I’ve found ways to use shared library between swf files in Flex, but not in Flash IDE. That is, until I found this amazing piece of work done by Matthew Tretter. Which basically brought _exclude back into Flash CS3!

It really shaved a lot of fat off my files, and whats great about it is that you only need to load the library in the root swf and then all child swfs will have access to the classes! (providing you give them the correct ApplicationDomain)

First of all, let me mention about programming on Vista with Visual Studio tools. Currently there is still a problem with compatibility between Visual Studio 2005 and Vista. Users of VS2005 have to first upgrade to Service Pack 1 then wait until they finish the VS2005 SP1 Vista compatibility patch which is current in beta, personally I’d advice not installing the beta until it is released unless you definitely have to, you can read more about it here. Secondly, SQL Server 2005 is also having compatibility issues with Vista and users will have to upgrade to SP2, this is also currently in a “Community Techology Preview” state, which means it is not the final release but you can get it here if you’re feeling brave enough. There are also installation issues with both VS2005 and SQL Server 2005 so before you start putting that disk into a drive, take a read at the microsoft website.

In other news, IIS7 has teamed up with Zend to create FastCGI, it is currently in a “technical preview” state and can be obtained here, with this in development it could hail a new era for Windows and the web development community. Personally I’m already using PHP5 on IIS6 in production using ISAPI but I was on the verge of converting everything to Linux, but when this is finally released it would be interesting to compare PHP performance on a Linux and Windows machine, according to this article from a member of the IIS team, performance is increased quite a lot and also it solves reliability issues that occurs in ISAPI.